How to Start a Presentation: 7 Openings That Work

Almost every article about how to start a presentation opens with a threat. You have eight seconds. Ten minutes at most, then attention collapses.

Neither number holds up.

OneThe attention clock you were sold

Karen Wilson and James Korn went back to the studies behind the famous claim that attention drops off after ten to fifteen minutes. They looked at note-taking studies, observation studies, self-reports and physiological measures, and concluded that the evidence gives little support to the belief. Most of it had not even accounted for the fact that people differ.

Diane Bunce and colleagues then measured it directly. Students in chemistry lectures reported their own attention lapses through handheld clickers, live, as the lecture ran. Two results matter to you. There was no sign of a decline during the first ten to fifteen minutes. And the lapses that did happen were mostly a minute or less, coming in cycles that got shorter as the lecture went on.

Two things follow. You cannot lose the room in eight seconds — so relax. And you cannot win it permanently in the first minute either, so stop trying to. The opening has a narrower and much more useful job: it tells people what to listen for, and it gets you talking.

Be fair to the evidence, though. Those were chemistry lectures with student volunteers clicking a device, not a sales pitch or a wedding toast. What the studies undermine is one specific claim about a timer. They do not say your opening is unimportant.

TwoThe seven openings

Each of these is a shape, not a script. Pick the one that fits your talk and your nerve on the day. The box below gives you the English for all seven.

• The question. You ask, they answer silently, they are now inside the topic.
• The unfinished fact. You start something the audience needs completed.
• The one person. A single named human, doing one specific thing.
• The surprising number. One figure that does not match what people assume.
• The bold claim. A sentence somebody in the room might argue with.
• The promise. You say exactly what they will have in four minutes.
• The quotation. Somebody else’s words, then why you disagree.

ThreeWhat a question actually does

Opening with a question is the most recommended technique in public speaking, and there is real evidence underneath it — with a sharp edge that nobody mentions.

Richard Petty, John Cacioppo and Martin Heesacker put the same messages to people, some phrased as statements and some as questions. A question made listeners process what followed more carefully.

Here is the edge. When the argument that followed was strong, the question made the message more persuasive. When the argument was weak, the question made it less persuasive. A question does not add power. It turns the audience’s thinking up, and then thinking finds whatever is actually there.

The effect also depends on how much the audience already cares about the topic. If they are already thinking hard, a question adds little.

So use a question when you are confident about the two minutes that follow it. If those two minutes are thin, a question is the worst possible opening: you have just invited the room to examine them.

FourCuriosity needs a foothold

George Loewenstein described curiosity as a kind of deprivation: it appears when you notice a gap between what you know and what you want to know. Not a gap in the world — a gap you can feel.

That leads somewhere useful. Curiosity is strongest when you already know a little and are missing one piece. It is weakest when you know nothing at all, because with nothing to hold onto there is no gap to notice, and it is weakest again when you already know everything.

Which explains why mysterious openings so often get no reaction. “What if I told you everything you know about communication is wrong?” gives nobody a foothold. Compare it with: “Last year this team lost four hundred hours. Not to meetings.” Now they have a number, a category ruled out, and one missing piece. That is a gap they can feel.

FiveThe opening advice that did not survive

You will read everywhere that one named person always beats a statistic — open with Maria, not with the percentage. The study behind that claim is usually Small, Loewenstein and Slovic in 2007, which found people gave more to a named child than to statistics about many children.

In 2023, Maximilian Maier, Yik Chun Wong and Gilad Feldman ran a preregistered replication of it and found no support for the effect. They also reported moderate evidence of publication bias in the earlier literature — meaning the studies that found the effect were more likely to get published than the ones that did not.

Use it because a specific person is easier to picture and easier to describe in a second language than an abstraction is. That is an honest reason. “Science says so” is not, and you deserve to be told the difference.

SixIf English is your second language, own this one sentence

Whichever opening you choose, write the first sentence out completely and learn it until it needs no thought. It is the only sentence you deliver at your most nervous, and that peak arrives before you start, not during.

Three rules for building it:

• Short. Under twelve words if you can. Long opening sentences fall apart in the middle, and they fall apart in front of everyone.
• No subordinate clause first. “Although the results we saw last quarter, which surprised everybody, were…” is a trap you built yourself. Start with the subject and the verb.
• No word you cannot say twice in a row. Test it. If a word makes you hesitate in your kitchen, it will stop you completely in the room. Choose a plainer one.

Then say your second sentence too, because getting from the first to the second is where prepared speakers freeze. Learn the pair.

The short version

Nobody is timing your first eight seconds. Attention flickers throughout, so the opening is not a rescue — it is a set of instructions about what to listen for. Choose one of the seven shapes. Use a question only when what follows is strong. Give curiosity something to hold onto. And learn your first two sentences by heart, because you deliver them at your most nervous.