Questions during or after your presentation give you a chance to clarify parts of your presentation and develop in detail aspects of the presentation that are of interest to the audience.  From the audience perspective, a speaker that takes questions is interactive and much more interesting.  Still, many speakers find answering audience questions an intimidating exercise.  Below are some guidelines that we hope will help you handle questions you receive during any presentation

• Anticipate the audience’s questions.  Often you will decide to include answers to them in your presentation.  If you decide not to include the information, you will be prepared with your best answer.
• Consider taking questions during your presentation.  If you are well organized you should be able to field questions that come during your presentation.  Audience questions will help you gauge whether the audience is understanding you and will allow the audience to prompt you to go into greater detail on parts of your presentation that are important to them.  Sometimes you will be lucky enough to have the presentation transform into a large conversation.
  
  If you take questions during your presentation you will need to manage them so that they don’t derail the organization of your presentation.  Feel free to delay answering questions that you know you will answer later in your presentation, but explain your intent to the questioner.  If someone asks a question that would take you on a tangent, you must decide whether this tangent is worth exploring and then focus your presentation accordingly.  For more guidance on how to handle questions, check out our handout on discussion leadership at www.sas.upenn.edu/cwic
• Always answer questions.  If you tell an audience member that you will get to a question later, make sure you do!  If you don’t know the answer to a question, say so.  You can still be helpful to the audience member by promising to get back to the them after you find the answer, or by explaining what information you do know. 
• Listen to the question.  People get aggravated when the answer they receive does not answer the question they asked.  If you are unsure of what a person means, or you suspect they intend to ask a different question than they are asking, don’t hesitate to ask for clarification before you answer.
• When necessary, interrupt politely.  If a member of the audience turns a question into a monologue, you may need to interrupt them.  It is important to interrupt in a way that does not make them feel poor.  One way to do this is to interject when they pause to breath.  You can make a statement that reinforces their interest in your topic and then move on.  If you also shift eye contact away from them, you will remove the spotlight from them.