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There’s probably a higher chance this actually happened than them having actual Autism.

They were perched on the edge of their seats anticipating OPs genius, guaranteed.

Could have been ;)

Anon described it as awkward silence. This implies that anon was picking up non verbal signals from their fellow students.

And that is a thing. Some courses even include learning how to watch for some signals to guide how you deliver a speech. In those classes, you might run into parts of the audience giving signals on purpose, but not to the point of it being registered as a single signal.

It’s also true that anon says they’re autistic, which means that there’s a decent chance that they weren’t reading the audience accurately, what with the difficulty neurotypical and neurodivergent people have reading each other.

That doesn’t change what I would tell anon though. It’s more useful, imo, to foster a mindset of “fuck em” when public speaking, and let nuance develop with experience. It helps build confidence, which changes your own body language and tone of voice.

As a constructed, exaggerated example of what I mean, an awkward silence is the audience looking down or away, while possibly fidgeting, or even cringing.

An active listener will be looking at you, even if not at your face, and at least pretend to be paying attention. Their hands would be less active, unless note taking is appropriate, because they’d be engaging different parts of the brain that tend to make people reduce movement.

Again, exaggerated for effect, but there’s a lot of little signals like that, that even autistic people can pick up on successfully despite the difficulties of crossreading NT and ND people.

Which, as an aside, discovering that NT and ND people have trouble reading each other, that it isn’t a one way street is such an important and useful discovery. It’s only been fairly recently proven out, but it completely changes how we can interact with each other. Just the awareness that an NT person is having as much trouble reading my signals for essentially the same reason I’m having trouble understanding theirs makes it so much easier.

But, it still comes back to, even if anon was misreading the room, that it’s still good to cultivate a sense of independence from the reaction of an audience. When attempting to change the minds of an audience, confidence, and projecting it matter. Yeah, anon would need to be taught how to mimic confidence as well, but that’s one part of what you learn when public speaking.