Susan Blackmore has an unexpected lecture experience at Oxford Royale Academy

[Htom Sirveaux]

75. It's part of good communication to establish connections with your audience.

When people like you and trust you, they pay more attention and give more consideration to what you have to say. So as a good speaker whose goal is to win a fair hearing for your ideas, establishing yourself as someone who is likeable and trustworthy is part of the job. It's why politicians thank local dignitaries, tell jokes to open speeches, and offer stories about local people in the most insignificant of towns, even if they hate being there. They are taking the audience seriously and respecting them, so that the audience will take them seriously and respect them in return.

Professor Blackmore's audience clearly included those with positive experiences of religion. By feeling entitled to ignore those experiences completely, she was sending the message that she couldn't be bothered to understand or sympathize with her audience. The audience reacted accordingly, and she was too wrapped up in her narrative of "religious people are close-minded" to see that the whole thing might have been avoided if she had considered the basic guidelines of being a good public speaker. Being a known atheist, even a vociferous one, does not place her above those guidelines.