I have a bunch of thoughts on public speaking, after a number of years of doing that. Maybe someday I'll write more ont his, but today I just wanted to capture the idea of including breaks.
As the speaker, you are responsible to a great degree of the experience of your audience. People will entrust you with their attention (or some portion thereof), and in turn you should provide them with something of value. For the technical talks I've tended to do, conveying a few key ideas or demonstrating what's possible tends to be the focus, and so there's an aspect of attention management (closely related to "entertainment") that you should be mindful of.
A 'palate cleanser' is one of the techniques that works well to break the monotony of having a person deliver information in a steady stream (even if it's done well, maybe with some interesting case or story to follow along). It can really come in many forms, but it's just the term I use when I'm changing the modality of the speaking experience, usually as I close a topic, every five to eight minutes when possible and appropriate.
Here are some ideas that I've used in the past.
If you're in a training setting, there are lots of opportunities for activities and further interactivity, but even in a more classical 'speaker speaks and audience listens' format, you can get better results and deliver a better exprience by incorporating these palate cleansers to improve flow and help reinforce the structure of what's being conveyed.
Happy public speaking!
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