19. Why Is It Important to Know Your Purpose and Audience Before You Choose Your Topic?

The Benefits of Understanding Your Audition

The more than you know and understand nigh the background and needs of your audience, the better yous can prepare your speech communication.

Learning Objectives

Explain why it is of import to sympathize your audience prior to delivering a speech

Fundamental Takeaways

Key Points

• Knowing your audition —their general age, gender, education level, religion, language, civilization, and grouping membership—is the single most important attribute of developing your speech.
• Analyzing your audience will help you observe data that you tin use to build common footing betwixt y'all and the members of your audition.
• A central characteristic in public speaking situations is the unequal distribution of speaking fourth dimension between the speaker and the audition. This means that the speaker talks more and the audience listens, often without asking questions or responding with whatsoever feedback.

Key Terms

• audience: 1 or more than people within hearing range of some message; for case, a group of people listening to a performance or speech; the crowd attending a stage functioning.
• audience analysis: A study of the pertinent elements defining the makeup and characteristics of an  audience.
• Audience-centered: Tailored to an audience. When preparing a message, the speaker analyzes the audience in order to adjust the content and linguistic communication usage to the level of the listeners.

Benefits of Understanding Audiences

When you are speaking, you want listeners to understand and reply favorably to what yous are saying. An audience is one or more than people who come together to listen to the speaker. Audition members may be face up to confront with the speaker or they may be connected past communication applied science such as computers or other media. The audience may be modest and private or it may be large and public. A fundamental characteristic of public speaking situations is the unequal distribution of speaking fourth dimension between speaker and audience. As an example, the speaker usually talks more while the audition listens, often without request questions or responding with any feedback. In some situations, the audience may enquire questions or reply overtly by clapping or making comments.

Understanding the Audience: It's important to understand the audition and generate a clear message before giving a speech.

Audition-Centered Approach to Speaking

Since at that place is ordinarily limited communication between the speaker and the audience, at that place is express opportunity to go back to explain your pregnant either during the speech communication or after. When planning a speech, it is important to know nigh the audition and to accommodate the message to the audience. You want to prepare an audience-centered speech communication, a speech with a focus on the audition.

In public speaking, you are speaking to and for your audition; thus, agreement the audience is a major part of the speech-making process. In audience-centered speaking, getting to know your target audition is one of the most important tasks that you face up. You want to learn about the major demographics of the audience, such as full general age, gender, education, faith, and culture, as well as to what groups the audition members vest. Additionally, learning about the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the members of your audition will permit you to anticipate and programme your bulletin.

Finding Mutual Footing by Taking Perspective

You desire to analyze your audition prior to your spoken communication so that during the speech you can create a link betwixt you, the speaker, and the audience. You lot want to exist able to figuratively step within the minds of audience members to empathise the world from their perspectives. Through this process, yous can detect common basis 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. There are very elementary methods for conducting an audition analysis, such equally interviewing a modest group nearly its knowledge or attitudes or using more involved methods of analyzing demographic studies of relevant segments of the population. Yous may besides find information technology useful to expect at sociological studies of unlike age groups or cultural groups. You might also use a questionnaire or rating scale to collect information about the basic demographic data and opinions of your target audience. These examples do not class an spread-out list of methods to analyze your audience, just they can help you obtain a full general understanding of how you tin learn about your audience. After because all the known factors, a contour of the intended audience can exist created, allowing you to speak in a manner that is understood past the intended audition.

Practical Benefits for the Speaker

Understanding who makes up your target audience will allow you to advisedly plan your message and adjust what you say to the level of understanding and background of the listeners. Two practical benefits of conducting an audience analysis are (1) to forestall you from proverb the wrong thing, such as telling a joke which offends, and (two) to help you speak to your audition in a linguistic communication they understand virtually things that involvement them. Your spoken communication will be more successful if you lot can create a message that informs and engages your audience.

What to Look For

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

Learning Objectives

Examine your audience based on demographics

Key Takeaways

Fundamental Points

• A speaker should look at his or her own values, beliefs, attitudes, and biases that may influence his or her perception of others.
• Guard confronting egocentrism. A speaker must not regard his or her own opinions or interests as being the most important or valid.
• Look at others to understand their background, attitudes, and beliefs.
• Focus on audience demographics such as age, gender, sexual orientation, education, 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.

Primal Terms

• egocentrism: Preoccupation with ane's own internal world; the conventionalities that one's own opinions or interests are the most important or valid.
• demographics: The characteristics of population such every bit historic period, gender, sexual orientation, occupation, teaching; classification of the characteristics of the people.

Await Inward to Uncover Blinders

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

Magnifying Glass: Speakers should apply 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 past the preoccupation with one'due south own internal world. Egocentrics regard themselves and their own opinions or interests every bit being the about of import or valid. Egocentric people are unable to fully understand or cope with other people'due south opinions and a reality that is different from what they are fix to accept.

Understanding Audience Background, Attitudes, and Beliefs

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

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

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

Speakers assess the audience'due south attitude – a positive or negative evaluation of people, objects, upshot, 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 behavior of the audition regarding the oral communication's general topic or particular purpose, speakers accept the ability to persuade the audience members to purchase into the speaker'due south statement. This can also help with speech preparation.

Tips for the Speaker

The depth of the audition analysis depends of the size of the intended audience and method of delivery. Speakers use dissimilar methods to become familiar with the background, attitudes, and behavior of audiences in different environments and using diverse mediums (e.g., videoconferencing, telephone, etc). For a pocket-sized audience, the speaker can merely speak with them in a physical surround. However, the speaker is addressing a larger audition or speaking via teleconferencing or webcasting tools, information technology may be useful to collect data via surveys or questionnaires.

What to Practice with Your Knowledge

Utilise knowledge almost your audience to step into their minds, create an imaginary scenario, and test your ideas.

Learning Objectives

Identify 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 globe 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, then forming a message to be delivered to a group of listeners, or audition. The audience members endeavor to decode what the speaker is maxim and then that they can sympathise it.
• The better the speaker knows the members of the audition beforehand, the amend the speaker can encode a message in a fashion that the audience can decode successfully.
• One of the most useful strategies for adapting your topic and message to your audience is to use the process of identification to find common ground with them.
• You tin can apply your analysis to create a theoretical, imagined audience of individuals from the diverse backgrounds y'all have discovered in your audience analysis. So you can determine whether or not the content will appeal to individuals within that audience.

Key Terms

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

Identifying with the listeners

Stride in to the minds of your listeners and meet if you can identify with them. A successful speaker engages in perspective-taking. While preparing her speech, the speaker steps outside her own perceptual framework to understand the world equally it is perceived past members of the audience. When the speaker takes an audience-centered arroyo to speech training, she focuses on the audience and how it 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 world as the audition members see 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 audition members then attempt to decode what the speaker is proverb then that they tin understand information technology. To amend imagine this process, consider the example of encoding and decoding equally it applies to the idea of a tree. I know that my audience is in New England and that they are familiar with oak trees. I use the give-and-take tree to encode my idea, and considering my audition has experienced similar trees, they decode the word tree in the way that I intended. However, I may exist thinking most a tree (a palm tree) that is in Hawaii, where I used to live, when I utilise the word tree to encode my idea. Unfortunately, when my audition decodes my word now, they are even so thinking about the oak tree and will not see my palm tree. The audition no longer shares my perspective of the world or my experience with trees.

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

Finding Common Ground

The more than you lot find out about your audience, the more than you can adjust your message to the interests, values, behavior, and language level of the audience. Once you collect information near your audience, you are ready to summarize your findings and select the language and structure that is best suited to your item audition. Y'all are on a journey to discover mutual footing in order to identify with your audience. One of the most useful strategies for adapting your topic and message to your audience is to utilize the process of identification. What do you and your audience have in mutual? And, conversely, how are you different? What ideas or examples in your spoken language can your audition identify with?

Creating a Theoretical, Imagined Audience

Create a theoretical, imagined state of affairs to exam your view of an audience for practice. You tin can use your analysis to create what is called a "theoretical, universal audition. " The universal audience is an imagined audience that serves equally a test for the speaker. Imagine in your mind a composite audition that contains individuals from the diverse backgrounds you lot have discovered in your audition analysis. Next, decide whether or not the content of your speech would appeal to individuals inside that audience. What words or examples will the audience sympathise and what will they not understand? What terms about your subject will y'all need to define or explain for this audience? How dissimilar are the values and opinions you want your audience to accept from the present attitudes and behavior they may hold?

Tips for the Speaker

In summary, use your knowledge of the audience to adapt your voice communication accordingly. Adopt the perspective of the audience in order to identify with them, and test out your ideas with an imagined audience composed of people with the background you take discovered through your enquiry.

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Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-communications/chapter/the-importance-of-audience-analysis/

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