Audience

If delivering a speech is a new experience for you, the suggestion that you analyze your audience beforehand, or even as you are speaking, may come as something of a shock. When you stand before this group of people you may view them only as the proverbial sea of faces. Yet some common characteristics have brought them together in the first place. Are they predominantly parents, college students, liberals, Roman Catholics, business people, educators, or anthropologists? Just about any group of listeners who gather in one place will do so for some of the same reasons. By establishing these reasons, you may find a strategy that allows you to appeal to the majority of audience members.

Audience Analysis

According to Clevenger (1966) there are at least two traditional methods by which the speaker may determine how best to adapt a message to a given audience: demographic analysis and purpose-oriented analysis.

Demographic Analysis

In demographic audience analysis the speaker first considers some general characteristics of the audience members—age, sex, geographic background, occupation, socioeconomic level, education, religion, and so on. These known characteristics suggest inferences about the audience's beliefs, attitudes, and values. Such inferences are then used to gear the message to what seems to be the audience's level and interests. This does not mean that as a speaker you change the thrust of your argument, but rather that you adapt its presentation for maximum impact.

Let us consider for a moment the value to the speaker of knowing beforehand certain relevant data about the members of the audience. Imagine that you are to give a talk on the causes of inflation. It might be extremely valuable to know something about the occupations of audience members. For example, you would expect the values and viewpoints of members of a labor union to be different from those of a group of business executives. In adapting your speech to these two audiences, you would probably choose a less formal language style for the union members than for the executives. You might say that large wage increases "fan the flames of inflation" rather than "perpetuate the inflationary cycle." With the executives you might choose a statistical approach showing percentage inflationary increases; with the union audience, you might talk about the cost of an average market basket from one year to the next.

Having a knowledge of demographic variables also makes it easier for the speaker to establish some common ground with audience members. This is often accomplished with an anecdote or a joke or a remark by the speaker indicating some sort of identification with the audience. It is common practice, for example, for a politician who comes from a small town to make some remark about his or her own upbringing when addressing a small-town audience. In his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention, former President Jimmy Carter made an appeal to delegates from many different regions of the United States when he remarked: "Now, our party was built out of a sweatshop on the old Lower East Side, the dark mills of New Hampshire, the blazing hearths of Illinois, the coal mines of Pennsylvania, the hardscrabble farmbelt, the Southern coastal plains and the unlimited frontiers of America" (The New York Times, July 16, 1976, p. A-10).

As we shall illustrate in discussing message variables, in all public communication the construction of a message is inherently linked to the speaker's analysis of the audience. Consider, for example, selecting materials of support. Suppose a speaker knows that she is a low-credibility source for the audience. She may wish to use more evidence. Initially, at least, the use of good evidence enhances credibility. Also, the kind of evidence the speaker uses will be different for different audiences. For an audience of Chicanes being urged to take adult education courses in English, quotations from Chicanes who have moved out of the barrios and secured high-status jobs because of their bilingual skills will probably be more persuasive than quotations from English teachers who lack any knowledge of Spanish.

The speaker's choice of language is another variable that ideally should be influenced by a knowledge of audience characteristics. Given this audience, will the terminology be familiar? Will the connotations of the words as used by the speaker be understood by the entire group? Are the metaphors and analogies appropriate for this audience? These are some of the many considerations for any speaker who has some prior knowledge about the demographic makeup of the audience.

There are numerous other ways in which demographic information about audience members may be used to one's advantage. Suppose, for example, that you plan to deliver a persuasive speech on the prevention of hijacking and that you have information about the level of education of audience members; virtually all of them will be college graduates and half will have advanced degrees. In this instance it would be wise to take into account the finding that intelligent or better-educated audiences respond more readily to two-sided rather than one-sided appeals.

Former President Ronald Reagan used the National Republican convention to deliver this farewell speech to the American people as well as to appeal to the television audience to vote Republican:

Before we came to Washington, Americans had just suffered the two worst back-to-back years of inflation in 60 years. Those are the facts. And as John Adams said: "Facts are stubborn things."

Interest rates had jumped to over 21 percent—the highest in 120 years-more than doubling the average monthly mortgage payments for working families—our families. When they sat around the kitchen table, it was not to plan summer vacations, it was to plan economic survival.

Facts are stubborn things.

Industrial production was down, and productivity was down for 2 consec­utive years.

The average weekly wage plunged 9 percent. The median family income fell 5¹/2 percent.

Facts are stubborn things.

Our friends on the other side had actually passed the single highest tax bill in the 200-year history of the United States. Auto loans, because of their policies, went up to 17 percent—so our great factories began shutting down. Fuel costs jumped through the atmosphere—more than doubling. Then | waited in gas lines as well as unemployment lines. Facts are stubborn things. (1989, p. 11)

It is important to emphasize that gathering demographic information is only the first step in audience analysis. Very often, the speaker goes on to make inferences about the beliefs, attitudes, and values of the audience. Often the speaker is trying to determine in advance what position audience members are likely to have about a given issue before public communication actually takes place. This might well help him or her to decide how much attitude change to attempt in the speech. Once you determine what position audience members are likely to take on a given issue, it is probably wise to construct a persuasive appeal that is within their latitude of acceptance. Otherwise, the appeal will be too discrepant with initial attitudes and will create a "boomerang effect" (see "How Much Change to Attempt," below). The usefulness of the assimilation-contrast theory will depend on how well the speaker analyzes the audience. For example, given information about the average age of audience members you might try to anticipate how discrepant your position on a particular issue would be from that of your audience. It is generally believed, for instance, that younger audiences tend to be more receptive to change and older audiences more conservative. Therefore, a speech favoring decriminalization of marijuana would probably be seen by a college-age audience as moderate but by their parents or grandparents as radical.

In certain audiences there will be more variability concerning important demographic characteristics. Here the speaker might find it necessary to appeal to a target audience within the larger audience, especially if the speaker's aim is persuasion and it is known that there will be a distinct group of opinion leaders within the audience.

Purpose-Oriented Analysis

A second mode of adapting the message to the audience is purpose-oriented audience analysis. Instead of analyzing audience characteristics, the speaker -begins by asking himself or herself what information about the audience is most important for the speaker's purposes. If you are an economist giving an informative speech about devaluation of currencies, you will want to know how much of an economics background the average listener has. Sometimes this information is easy to establish; sometimes you will have to make inferences. In any case, you begin with a general idea of audience level and constantly refer back to it as you prepare your speech. Can you assume that the listener will know what the gold standard is, or will you have to explain the concept in some detail? Will a quote from John Kenneth Galbraith be recognized as evidence from a high-credibility source? Will the audience be familiar with the basic concepts of statistics or probability theory? In contrast to demographic analysis, in which you gather information about the audience before preparing your speech, purpose-oriented analysis will be an ongoing part of your message preparation.

Both these approaches are concerned with audience variability with adapting a message to a specific audience. One interesting question we might ask in this connection is, are audiences equally persuasible?

Listener Persuasibility

Persuasibillty, as the term implies, refers to a listener's susceptibility to persuasion. A question that researchers and public speakers have often raised is whether there is a difference between men's and women's openness to persuasion.

Research indicates that women are often more readily swayed than men (Tuthill and Forsyth, 1982). This pattern was not always borne out in studies of children, however, which suggested that willingness to be persuaded might be learned as part of the female sex role. An interesting study by Montgomery and Burgoon (1977) found that psychological sex is a better predictor of sex differences in persuasibility than anatomical sex. Feminine females are more persuasible than masculine males, whereas androgynous males and females hardly differ.

As the female sex role in our society continues to undergo redefinition, differences in persuasibility will be less and less predictable. In fact, Rosenfeld and Christie (1974) concluded that it has become "futile to attempt to conclude that one sex is more persuasible than another" (p. 23).

A second question that has been the object of much research concerns the correlation between personality and persuasibility. Is it true, for example, that some people are resistant to changing their minds in all situations whereas others go along with almost everything one says? Early research on this question looked for "those attitudes or personality factors leading to low or high resistance to a wide variety of persuasive communication on many diverse topics." Some people were more persuasible than others, regardless of the subject of the persuasive appeal. Furthermore, these people tended to be more easily persuaded in either direction on a given topic—to be more in favor of, or more opposed to, cancer research, for example (Janis and Field, in Hovland and Janis, 1959).

In another study the same research team tried to identify the personality characteristics linked to persuasibility. Although they were unable to find correlations with specific traits, they did learn that people who are socially inhibited and show feelings of social inadequacy tend to be more persuasible Qanis and Field, in Hovland and Janis, 1959). On the basis of these findings, it is generally agreed that persuasible people tend to have low self-esteem, a perception that presumably extends to their opinions: Such people value the opinions of others more than their own. By contrast, the person who resists persuasion is described as "likely to be little affected by external standards in other kinds of situations, to have a mature and strong self-image, to value subjective feeling and have a relatively rich inner life, to examine himself and his role in life to an extent that may include marked self-criticism, and to be independent without being rebellious" (Linton and Graham, in Hovland and Janis, 1959, p. 96).

Although there is little the speaker can do to control for such variables as listener persuasibility, it is still of interest to know that some personality differences affect persuasibility. This information might be especially useful in demographic audience analysis. For example, before an all-male audience, a female speaker might attempt a more thoroughgoing persuasive strategy than she would before an all-female audience that was already well disposed toward her argument.

When we feel strongly enough about an issue to get up and speak in front of others, we sometimes confuse intensity with effectiveness. We may speak out passionately on a particular issue, but sometimes we fail to obtain the desired outcome—whether it be information gain, attitude change, or action. Noting this tendency among relatively inexperienced speakers, one public communication expert observed:

Gone from ... contemporary discourse are the familiar introduction, body and conclusions; the statement and partition of issues; internal summaries; topical, spatial, chronological, or any other particular kind of order. More typically today ... college coeds begin to talk with rambling personal experiences, sometimes rather dramatic, and finish about where they started, with a liberal sprinkling of "you knows" in between. (Haiman, in Linkugel et al., 1969, p. 157)

In order to avoid the rambling pattern described above, experts recommend the traditional use of introduction, body, and conclusion to organize a speech.

The introduction provides the opportunity to establish a common ground, gain the audience's attention, establish the thesis of the speech, and relate the importance of the topic or speech. A preview of what's coming is also a good idea, as this orients the audience and aids in their listening. By the end of the introduction, audience members should be attentive, familiar with the speaker and with what is to come, and should want to hear the speech. The introduction "sets up" the audience for the speaker and his or her speech.

The body of the speech presents the information and/or arguments indicated in the introduction. This is the largest part of the speech, possibly as much as 80 -percent, unless the audience is hostile, in which case the introduction-might be very long. In general, the body of a speech should contain few points (remember from the listening chapter that audiences forget half of what they hear immediately after hearing it, and then lose another half within a few months). The fewer the number of points, the higher the probability the audience members will remember what is said.

The conclusion often gets the most attention since members know you are about to end. With this in mind, it comes as no surprise that the conclusion of the speech reviews what was said and finishes the speech with some memorable remarks. The message remembered, the "residual message," is tied significantly to the last words of the speech, so those last words must emphasize for the audience, in a memorable way, exactly what each member might best remember of the speech.

In this portion of the chapter we shall concentrate on ways of preparing and presenting messages that will ensure optimum effectiveness. For centuries students of public communication have discussed the subject of organizing speech material, the use of supporting materials, the speaker's choice of language, as well as several other options available to the speaker in choosing an appropriate strategy for persuasion. Only within the twentieth century, however, have experimental investigations allowed us to put some of these age-old notions to the test.

In studying message variables, or alternative ways of presenting a message, we shall review over thirty years of research. This period is one of the most fruitful in providing experimental clarification of some long-standing questions. We shall find, however, that some of the answers are more complex than we might have anticipated, that many substantive issues are still unresolved, and that there are some very important elements of speech preparation about which few research data exist. Many practical aspects of speech preparation are illustrated in the annotated speeches in the Appendix.

Organization

According to many theorists, virtually all speeches consist of an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. At some point within the speech there may also be a direct statement—a thesis sentence—that crystallizes the speaker's central idea. This theme, whether stated directly or not, will be elaborated in the main and subordinate points of the speaker's presentation. How the speaker chooses to organize and elaborate on speech materials is an issue of some concern, partic­ularly for those with little experience or training in public speaking.

The would-be speech maker who looks to the literature on message organization for guidance finds little research of practical value. It is known that receivers prefer a speech that is organized rather than disorganized and furthermore, that they can tell the difference between the two types of speeches. It is also true that poor organization lowers the audience's opinion of the speaker, thus taking away from speaker credibility (Sharp and McClung, 1966). Conclusions about the specific effects of good organization are more difficult to draw, however.

Research on the combined effects of organization and fluency does yield two important conclusions: first, a persuasive message that is organized and fluently presented produces significantly greater attitude change than one that is (a) disorganized but fluently presented, (b) organized but not fluently presented, or (c) disorganized and not fluently presented. Second, good organization enhances credibility. A speaker is perceived to be more credible if he or she presents an organized, rather than a disorganized, version of a message (McCroskey and Mehrley, 1969, p. 16). This study gives us information about extremes in organization and fluency but not about the effects of gradations. Moreover, it studies the combined effects of organization and delivery rather than isolating those of organization per se. An earlier study (Smith, 1951) of message organization shows that when the speaker is attempting to induce attitude change, a message that is disorganized in a minor way will have little significance, but one that is extremely disorganized will be a severe drawback in the speaker's efforts to persuade. On the other hand, good organization can increase comprehension (Thistlethwaite et al., 1955)- So we can see the influence of organization on at least three variables of source credibility, attitude change, and understanding. (For more information about good organization as an essential aspect of message preparation, see Me Croskey, 1978, pp. 18O-182; and Bettinghaus, 1968, pp. 148-183.)

No research points to a single pattern of organization as the most desirable. In assembling speech materials the speaker must find the pattern best suited to his or her particular message and to the particular audience to be addressed. (We have already discussed some aspects of the adaptation of speech materials to one's audience when we discussed audience analysis.) A speaker has many options in organizing materials. In the following pages we shall discuss five of the more popular patterns.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 924