1. What Is The Purpose Of Understanding The Makeup Of Your Audience?

The Benefits of Agreement Your Audition

The more you know and understand near the background and needs of your audition, the better you can ready your oral communication.

Learning Objectives

Explain why information technology is important to sympathise your audience prior to delivering a speech

Primal Takeaways

Fundamental Points

Knowing your audience —their general age, gender, teaching level, faith, language, culture, and group membership—is the single most important aspect of developing your speech.
Analyzing your audience will help you detect information that you can use to build common ground between you and the members of your audition.
A key characteristic in public speaking situations is the unequal distribution of speaking time betwixt the speaker and the audience. This means that the speaker talks more and the audience listens, frequently without asking questions or responding with any feedback.

Key Terms

audience: One or more people within hearing range of some message; for instance, a group of people listening to a performance or speech; the crowd attention a phase performance.
audition analysis: A study of the pertinent elements defining the makeup and characteristics of an audience.
Audience-centered: Tailored to an audition. When preparing a message, the speaker analyzes the audience in club to adapt the content and language usage to the level of the listeners.

Benefits of Understanding Audiences

When you are speaking, y'all want listeners to understand and respond favorably to what yous are proverb. An audience is one or more people who come together to mind to the speaker. Audience members may be face to face up with the speaker or they may be connected by advice applied science such as computers or other media. The audience may be small and private or information technology may exist big and public. A key characteristic of public speaking situations is the diff distribution of speaking fourth dimension between speaker and audition. As an case, the speaker usually talks more while the audience listens, oft without asking questions or responding with any feedback. In some situations, the audience may ask questions or respond overtly by clapping or making comments.

A picture of an audience at the Brooklyn Book Festival in New York City.

Understanding the Audience: It'due south of import to understand the audience and generate a clear message earlier giving a speech.

Audience-Centered Approach to Speaking

Since in that location is usually limited communication between the speaker and the audience, there is limited opportunity to become back to explicate your meaning either during the speech or afterward. When planning a spoken language, it is of import to know about the audience and to adapt the message to the audience. You want to prepare an audience-centered voice communication, a oral communication with a focus on the audience.

In public speaking, y'all are speaking to and for your audition; thus, understanding the audience is a major part of the spoken language-making process. In audience-centered speaking, getting to know your target audience is 1 of the most important tasks that you face. You want to learn most the major demographics of the audience, such as general historic period, gender, education, faith, and civilization, as well every bit to what groups the audience members vest. Additionally, learning almost the values, attitudes, and behavior of the members of your audition will permit you to anticipate and programme your message.

Finding Common Footing by Taking Perspective

You want to clarify your audience prior to your spoken communication and then that during the speech communication yous tin can create a link between y'all, the speaker, and the audition. You want to be able to figuratively pace inside the minds of audition members to sympathise the world from their perspectives. Through this process, you lot can observe mutual ground with your audience, which allows you to align your message with what the audience already knows or believes.

Gathering and Interpreting Information

Audience analysis involves gathering and interpreting information about the recipients of oral, written, or visual communication. In that location are very unproblematic methods for conducting an audition assay, such as interviewing a small group about its knowledge or attitudes or using more involved methods of analyzing demographic studies of relevant segments of the population. Y'all may also notice it useful to await at sociological studies of different age groups or cultural groups. Yous might also use a questionnaire or rating scale to collect data nigh the bones demographic data and opinions of your target audience. These examples do not class an spread-out list of methods to analyze your audience, but they can help you obtain a general agreement of how y'all tin learn about your audience. After considering all the known factors, a profile of the intended audience can be created, allowing you to speak in a manner that is understood past the intended audience.

Practical Benefits for the Speaker

Understanding who makes up your target audience volition allow you to carefully programme your message and adapt what y'all say to the level of understanding and background of the listeners. Ii practical benefits of conducting an audience analysis are (1) to prevent y'all from maxim the incorrect thing, such as telling a joke which offends, and (ii) to help you speak to your audience in a language they understand almost things that interest them. Your speech will be more than successful if you can create a message that informs and engages your audience.

What to Look For

Analyze the audience to find the mix of ages, genders, sexual orientations, educational levels, religions, cultures, ethnicities, and races.

Learning Objectives

Examine your audition based on demographics

Central Takeaways

Key Points

A speaker should expect at his or her own values, beliefs, attitudes, and biases that may influence his or her perception of others.
Baby-sit against egocentrism. A speaker must not regard his or her ain opinions or interests as being the near of import or valid.
Look at others to understand their background, attitudes, and behavior.
Focus on audience demographics such as age, gender, sexual orientation, pedagogy, religion, and other relevant population characteristics to clarify the audition.
The depth of the audience analysis depends of the size of the intended audience and the method of delivery.

Key Terms

egocentrism: Preoccupation with one's ain internal globe; the conventionalities that ane's own opinions or interests are the most important or valid.
demographics: The characteristics of population such as age, gender, sexual orientation, occupation, education; classification of the characteristics of the people.

Look Inward to Uncover Blinders

A public speaker should plough her mental magnifying drinking glass inward to examine the values, beliefs, attitudes, and biases that may influence her perception of others. The speaker should use this mental picture to wait at the audience and view the earth from the audience's perspective. By looking at the audience, the speaker understands their reality.

Magnifying Glass: Speakers should use a metaphorical magnifying glass to examine their values, beliefs, and attitudes.

When the speaker views the audience only through her mental perception, she is likely to engage in egocentrism. Egocentrism is characterized by the preoccupation with one'south ain internal world. Egocentrics regard themselves and their ain opinions or interests as being the most of import or valid. Egocentric people are unable to fully understand or cope with other people'due south opinions and a reality that is dissimilar from what they are ready to accept.

Agreement Audience Background, Attitudes, and Beliefs

Public speakers must look at who their audience is, their background, attitudes, and beliefs. The speaker should attempt to reach the most authentic and effective analysis of her audience inside a reasonable amount of time. For instance, speakers can assess the demographics of her audience. Demographics are detailed accounts of human population characteristics and usually rendered as statistical population segments.

For an analysis of audience demographics for a speech, focus on the same characteristics studied in folklore. Audiences and populations comprise groups of people represented by different age groups that:

Are of the same or mixed genders
Have experienced the same events
Have the same or unlike sexual orientation
Have dissimilar educational attainment
Participate in unlike religions
Represent different cultures, ethnicities, or races

Speakers appraise the audience'south attitude – a positive or negative evaluation of people, objects, event, activities, or ideas – toward a specific topic or purpose. The attitudes of the audience may vary from extremely negative to extremely positive, or completely ambivalent. By examining the preexisting beliefs of the audition regarding the speech's general topic or particular purpose, speakers have the ability to persuade the audition members to buy into the speaker's argument. This can also help with speech preparation.

Tips for the Speaker

The depth of the audience assay depends of the size of the intended audience and method of delivery. Speakers use different methods to become familiar with the groundwork, attitudes, and behavior of audiences in unlike environments and using various mediums (e.chiliad., videoconferencing, telephone, etc). For a modest audience, the speaker can simply speak with them in a physical surround. However, the speaker is addressing a larger audience or speaking via teleconferencing or webcasting tools, it may be useful to collect information via surveys or questionnaires.

What to Do with Your Knowledge

Use knowledge about your audition to step into their minds, create an imaginary scenario, and test your ideas.

Learning Objectives

Place with your audience by adopting their perspective

Key Takeaways

Key Points

A successful speaker is able to step outside her own perceptual framework to understand the world as it is perceived by members of her audience.
The speaker engages in a process of first encoding his or her ideas from thoughts into words, and then forming a bulletin to be delivered to a group of listeners, or audience. The audience members attempt to decode what the speaker is maxim so that they can understand information technology.
The better the speaker knows the members of the audition beforehand, the better the speaker can encode a message in a way that the audience can decode successfully.
One of the about useful strategies for adapting your topic and message to your audience is to utilise the process of identification to find common ground with them.
You tin use your assay to create a theoretical, imagined audience of individuals from the diverse backgrounds yous accept discovered in your audience analysis. And so yous can determine whether or not the content will appeal to individuals within that audience.

Key Terms

encode: to plough one's ideas into spoken linguistic communication in order to transmit them to listeners
message: the exact and nonverbal components of language, sent to the receiver by the sender, that convey an idea
Decode: to translate the sender'south spoken idea/message into something the receiver understands by using his or her noesis of language based on personal experience

Identifying with the listeners

Stride in to the minds of your listeners and see if you tin identify with them. A successful speaker engages in perspective-taking. While preparing her speech, the speaker steps exterior her own perceptual framework to understand the world every bit it is perceived by members of the audience. When the speaker takes an audition-centered approach to speech communication grooming, she focuses on the audience and how information technology will respond to what is being said. In essence, the speaker wants to mentally adopt the perspective of members of the audience in order to see the globe equally the audition members come across it.

Encoding and Decoding

The speaker engages a process of encoding his or her ideas from thoughts into words, and of forming a message which is then delivered to an audience. The audience members then endeavor to decode what the speaker is saying so that they tin empathise it. To amend imagine this procedure, consider the instance of encoding and decoding as information technology applies to the idea of a tree. I know that my audience is in New England and that they are familiar with oak copse. I employ the word tree to encode my idea, and because my audience has experienced like trees, they decode the discussion tree in the way that I intended. Notwithstanding, I may be thinking about a tree (a palm tree) that is in Hawaii, where I used to alive, when I use the give-and-take tree to encode my idea. Unfortunately, when my audience decodes my word now, they are all the same thinking about the oak tree and will not see my palm tree. The audience no longer shares my perspective of the globe or my experience with trees.

A picture that shows the process of encoding and decoding. The speaker encodes the message (thinks of a tree). When he says "tree" he sends the message to the other person. The listener hears the message and decodes it (hears the word "tree" and then has a visual of a tree).

Encoding Communication: One speaker encodes a message and sends the message. The listener hears the message and decodes information technology.

Finding Common Ground

The more you find out about your audience, the more you tin can adapt your bulletin to the interests, values, beliefs, and language level of the audition. In one case you collect data near your audience, you are set up to summarize your findings and select the linguistic communication and construction that is best suited to your item audience. You are on a journey to discover common ground in lodge to place with your audition. 1 of the about useful strategies for adapting your topic and bulletin to your audience is to employ the process of identification. What practice you and your audience have in common? And, conversely, how are you different? What ideas or examples in your speech tin your audience identify with?

Creating a Theoretical, Imagined Audience

Create a theoretical, imagined situation to test your view of an audience for practise. You tin employ your assay to create what is called a "theoretical, universal audience. " The universal audience is an imagined audience that serves every bit a test for the speaker. Imagine in your mind a composite audience that contains individuals from the diverse backgrounds y'all accept discovered in your audition analysis. Next, make up one's mind whether or not the content of your spoken language would entreatment to individuals within that audience. What words or examples volition the audition understand and what will they not understand? What terms about your subject area will you demand to define or explain for this audition? How dissimilar are the values and opinions yous want your audience to accept from the present attitudes and beliefs they may concord?

Tips for the Speaker

In summary, employ your knowledge of the audience to adapt your oral communication accordingly. Prefer the perspective of the audience in order to identify with them, and exam out your ideas with an imagined audience equanimous of people with the background y'all take discovered through your research.