McGraw-Hill Public Speaking

• Selecting a topic
• Assessing your speaking situation
• Developing and refining your central idea and purpose
• Identifying an audience
• Speaking to an audience
• Home

Audience analysis begins before you settle on a topic. You will need to keep your audience in mind as you select your topic, prepare, and deliver your speech. An audience-centered approach helps you select a topic that captures and maintains audience interest. Your speech should evoke a response you desire among your listeners. To produce the desired result, you must first learn enough about your audience to be able to gauge the response different topics and presentations will elicit. Try to establish a connection with your audience.

Avoid common mistakes

Avoid common mistakes that will alienate your audience. Some mistakes bore listeners and cause them to tune out. Select a topic you can speak about with genuine interest. If you're bored by your topic, it will show in your presentation. A well-organized speech given by a speaker who shows no enthusiasm for the topic will miss its mark. Audiences also tune out speakers who leave them behind. When giving a speech on a topic you know a great deal about, remember that your audience may need help understanding concepts that you already know. Don't become so immersed in a topic that you lose the audience in technical jargon and minute details.

Talk to your audience not at them. Audiences resent being lectured at or treated as though invisible.

Be careful about assuming that your audience shares your biases and beliefs. If you are speaking to an unfamiliar group, you probably recognize that you must learn about them before you speak to them. Even with familiar groups, however, you should avoid relying on intuition. It is often wrong.

Students in a marketing class researched local businesses that interested them. Each student developed an advertising strategy and prepared a promotional speech for his or her target audience. One student promoting a mobile disc jockey service identified her target audience as anyone having parties, dances, or wedding receptions. Her presentation focused on the decibel range of the equipment, the number of speakers, the power of the amplifiers, and the wide selection of heavy metal cuts. On their critique forms, many students noted that although they were approximately her age, they did not share her appreciation of loud music. Even those who felt they would enjoy the music expressed doubt about her target audience. Who does she think is going to pay for the DJ at a wedding? My parents wouldn't hire a DJ whose main selling point is volume.

The student assumed that anyone having a party would want the kind of music she enjoyed at parties. Careful audience analysis often shows that audience members are quite different from us.

Ideally, speakers would be able to survey, interview, and observe members of the audience. Actual audience research depends on the importance of the speech, the preparation time, and the cost of research. In any speaking situation, however, you will achieve better results if you make the effort to understand your audience.

Demographic factors influence audience reaction. Examples of demographic factors include: age, gender, religion, group membership and racial, cultural, or ethnic background. A speech on WWII does not elicit the same emotional response among twenty-year-olds that it does among seventy-year-olds. A speech that uses informal languages, such as "you," may be regarded negatively by an international audience and positively by American audiences. If you are giving a speech to a group or organization you are unfamiliar with, research the organization before you speak to them.

Aristotle maintained that the most important factor influencing audience perceptions is age. Although members of a generation may vary greatly from one another, they share a number of common historical experiences. An informative speech on local rock bands may interest a few people at a senior citizen's center, but probably not the majority. Consider the age of your audience or whetherthe audience has a wide age range. If the age range is outside your own, be sure not to make assumptions.

Organizations exist that provide demographic data on audiences. Market studies to obtain such data are costly and not typically used by students. However, some basic information gathering and assessment should be done to eliminate obvious blunders. At a minimum, you should be able to identify the intended audience for your message and adapt your message to them.