If you want your audience to remember your message, they need to hear it more than once. Perhaps at least three times.
That repetition needs to be spaced out throughout the presentation.
Why do you need to repeat the key message? Because they might have missed it, or not recognized the importance.
Some of your words are more important than others and you want to emphasize those words so the audience can easily remember your key points. Your key message can likely be summed up in about six to 10 words.
The average rate of speaking is between 110 and 150 words per minute. That means in a five-minute presentation about 500 to 700 words were spoken. Without emphasis your 10 words have less than 2% chance of being remembered. Imagine the challenge when you speak for 30 minutes and deluge the audience with 3,000 to 4,500 words.
There are techniques to emphasise key points and repetition is one effective technique. Don’t over do it. And don’t apologize for repeating.
Don’t preface your words with “As I said before” or “as was previously mentioned”. Those phrases feel like apologies and they dimmish the power of repetition.
When you want to remember a name, an address or line, you repeat it. How many times? Enough to remember.
Marketers understand this principle. That’s why they repeat the phrase during the ad and repeat the ad.
Do you remember the key line that Martin Luthor King stated during his famous speech?
“I have a dream!”
Did you know that he stated that line 8 times during his speech? Not once did he say, “As I said before”.
I don’t suggest that you repeat the key line 8 times in your presentation. Instead, recognize the power of repetition and get comfortable with it.
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