Continue Reading Below Advertisement

All that said, I want you to memorize the acronym for Forced Audience Participation (FAP) because it's very apt. FAP is basically a speaker getting his rocks off by having the audience do things that he can fool himself into believing are a sign of how interested they are in his fascinating speech.

For example, there's a kind of bad habit going around where the audience has a printed outline of the speech, and at certain points, the speaker asks them to stop and circle a key word. Sometimes this makes sense, I guess, if you're introducing a new term like the 180 degree rule, or if the word is central to all the points you're making. ("Quentin Tarantino goes in a lot of exciting directions in his films but it all comes back to his foot fetish. I want you to circle 'foot fetish.' We're going to come back to that a lot.")

Filmdrunk



"Just like Tarantino does."

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Of course, all this depends on a grasp of what words are vital and recurring in your speech, and you know what? Most people with that skill know how to emphasize those words without making people circle them on a piece of paper. So most of the people using this trick have no idea what words would be appropriate to circle. I have seen speakers tell me to circle words like "the" and "and" in a desperate last-ditch effort to feel like the audience is listening to something they are saying.