Consider Your Audience

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At each stage in crafting your speech, you must be mindful of your audience. The audience analysis skills and techniques presented in Chapter 5 will help you throughout the public speaking process. Consciousness of your audience will be important as you select a topic, determine the purpose of your speech, develop your central idea, generate main ideas, gather supporting material, develop your organization, rehearse, and deliver your speech.

This page has you think about your audience. Return to this page for each speech you give. There are three stages to this activity:

Preliminary Questions about Your Audience
Demographic Analysis about Your Audience
Evaluation of How You Adapted to the Audience During the Speech.

This activity contains 3 questions.

Stage 1: Preliminary Questions about Your Audience

Your book's authors present several important ideas for you to consider about your audience: their cultural differences, their attitudes, and the setting of the speech. Consider these items now by answering the questions below and submitting your response to your journal.

Which cultural differences will be important for you to consider? How would you characterize the cultural diversity of your audience?
What type of attitudes does your audience have towards you and your topic? Are they captive or voluntary? Interested or uninterested? Favorable, neutral, undecided, or unfavorable?
What is the environment of your speech? How many people will attend? How will they be seated? How close will you be to the audience?

To create paragraphs in your essay response, type at the beginning of the paragraph, and at the end.

Stage 2: Demographic Analysis

Demographics involve information about the age, race, sex, educational level, and religious views of your audience. In order to conduct demographic information about your audience, you can informally observe your audience or conduct a more formal survey of them. These questions will help you identify demographic variables in your audience. (You might create a survey that you give to them based on these questions.)

What is the average age of your audience?
16 or younger, 17-24, 25-35, 36-50, 51 and older
What is the sex of your audience?
# of Females, # of Males
What educational level has your audience attained?

To create paragraphs in your essay response, type at the beginning of the paragraph, and at the end.

Stage 3: Evaluating Your Audience Adaptation

Your textbook identifies several strategies by which you can observe your audience as you speak and they adjust your speech to their responses. Following your speech, you should evaluate how well you adapted your speech and review these notes before your next speech. Use these questions to help your self-evaluation.

What nonverbal responses did your audience provide during your speech?
How did you adapt to these cues?
Did your reading of the audience's nonverbal and verbal cues during the speech match their nonverbal and verbal cues following the speech?
What might you do differently next time to adapt to your audience?

To create paragraphs in your essay response, type at the beginning of the paragraph, and at the end.

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