The Truth About Confident Presenting

Chapter 27. Begin with a Purpose in Mind

Give some thought to how you’ll begin your talk, because your introduction is one of the most memorable aspects of the speech. The so-called primacy effect in psychology is a bias in the way people perceive and think about what they hear. Listeners are more likely to remember and believe what they hear first, rather than what they hear later on. This phenomenon is due to the fact that short-term memory at the beginning of a sequence of events is far less “crowded” and, because there are fewer items being processed in the brain, there is more time for rehearsal, consolidation, and storage of those events, which can later cause them to be transferred to long-term memory.

Listeners are more likely to remember ...