When a question becomes a nightmare: surviving the most difficult part of your presentation

tician and re-formulating the question so that in the end you answer the question you wanted to be asked. However, we all know that the Q+A session provides you, the presenter, with some important feedback. To begin with, from their questions you realise what the audience has or has not understood. A vibrant Q+A session means contact and interaction , whereas a limp one can cause serious harm to your talk. Remember that the Q+A session is still a part of your performance and you will be judged on how you deal with questions and not merely on your data and the content of your slides. Answers have to be concise, precise, well articulated , convincing and, hopefully, correct. When facing the Q+A session, bear the following points in mind: • Leave nothing to chance: be prepared for any possible question • Always be positive and honest with the audience • Remember to answer all questions, even those you might have 'on hold' • Always listen to the complete question • Make sure the whole audience has heard the question, maybe by repeating it yourself • Keep eye contact with the questioner while answering, but also involve the rest of the audience so as to avoid a 'private conver-sation' • Remember: there are NO stupid questions Many presenters, even those who have been speaking in public for years, consider question time to be the trickiest and most difficult moment of their talk. You, the pre-senter, will have prepared your slides carefully and you should also have carried out endless, scrupulous rehearsals in order to deliver your data in an interesting and entertaining manner. However, you can't control your audience and you never really know what questions they might ask. Well, this is not exactly true as a good pre-senter will generally be able to predict the main questions that will be asked. Indeed, a very good presenter will anticipate the audi-ence's main queries and give the answers during the talk itself, thus avoiding time wasting during the question-and-answer (Q+A) session. So, why panic? Non-native English speakers are, as a rule, not terrified of the questions , however complex and difficult they might be, but of the questioners! Or, maybe I should say, they are afraid of not being able to understand the questioners' Eng-lish. This can be embarrassing, and asking someone to endlessly repeat a question is not at all …