Plan the questions

Claim: the questions are part of the talk: the likely ones are prepared, with backup slides.

• Grade: convention (the research is descriptive).
• Evidence: review, strand 5; position, Not known.
• Check: talk-structure (heuristic): a slide for questions or backup, known by its class or by a headline that names questions, backup or an appendix.
• Reader styles: changed by academic audience (peers or a jury) casual audience (questions during the talk, in a small room), and business decision maker (the Q&A is part of the decision).

What it asks

• Leave time for questions, and give the Q&A its own plan (baseline checklist).
• List the likely questions before the talk, and prepare an answer for each.
• Put backup slides after the final slide for the details a question may need.
• Say what the evidence is and where it is weak, so the question is not a surprise.

Why

Q&A research is sparse and mostly descriptive. In 80 computer science sessions (268 turns), question forms were linked to functions and rapport work (Xu 2022, secondary).

Limits

• What a Q&A should do for the listener's memory is not known.
• Backup slides have no study found. They are a convention.
• The one measured result concerns investors, not talks in general: Kanze 2018 is described in the business context of the business decision maker.