Audience Analysis
Good public speakers are audiencecentered. They know the primary purpose of
speech-making is to gain a desired response
The speaker’s aim is to adjust to the
concerns of the audience, not to show how
much she or he knows about a wide variety
of issues.
One way is to find out as much as you can
in advance about your audience.
Psychology of Audiences
• It’s up to the speaker to make the audience
choose to pay attention
• Every speech contains two messages – the
one sent by the speaker and the one
received by the listener
Frame of reference
• What a speaker says is filtered through a
listener’s frame of reference – the sum of
his or her needs, interests, expectations,
knowledge and experience.
Egocentricity
• People are egocentric. They want to hear
about things that are meaningful to them.
“Why is this important to me?”
• Result is listeners will hear and judge what
you say on the basis of what they already
know and believe.
• Second, you must relate your message to
your listeners.
Demographic Audience Analysis
• Observable traits such as age, gender,
religious orientation, racial, ethnic or
cultural orientation, group membership,
place of residence, occupation, social status,
income, etc.
Two steps to Demographic
Analysis
• First, identify the general demographic
features of your audience
• Gauge the importance of those features to a
particular speaking situation
Situational Audience Analysis
• Traits such as size of audience, attitudes
influenced by the physical setting,
disposition of the audience toward the
subject, speaker and occasion.
Size
• The larger your audience, the more formal
the presentation must be
Physical setting
• Temperature, space, audio-visual available,
time of day
Disposition toward topic
• Interest: Outside class, people don’t usually
expend the effort to attend a speech they
aren’t interested in. But your classmates
must. That makes you have to work harder.
• Knowledge: Strong correlation between
interest in a topic and knowledge about it.
– If your audience knows little about your topic,
you will have to talk at a more elementary
level. If well-informed, take a more technical
approach.
• Attitude: If you know in advance, can adjust
what you have to say to what your audience
needs to hear
• Disposition toward speaker: An audience’s
response is invariably clouded by their
perception of the speaker.
• Occasion: Will dictate what can be said and
how long speech should be.
Two stages of audience adapation
• Stage one before the speech as part of your
preparation
• Stage two during the presentation
Before speech
• Assess how your audience is likely to
respond to what you will say
• Adjust what you say to make it as clear,
appropriate and convincing as possible.
During speech
• Confused, angry, asleep, murmuring?