Audience Centered Approach

CONSIDER YOUR AUDIENCE

from Public Speaking An Audience-Centered Approach

Why should the central focus of public speaking be the audience? Why is it not topic selection, outlining, or research?

The simple truth is, your audience influences the topic you choose and every later step of the public speaking process. Your selection of topic, purpose, and even major ideas should be based on a thorough understanding of your listeners. In a very real sense, your audience “writes” the speech. The graph (left) shows, considering your audience is an ongoing activity. The needs, attitudes, beliefs, values, and other characteristics of your audience should play a leading role at every step. After you select your topic, you need to consider how the audience will respond to your examples, organization, and delivery. That’s why, in the model, arrows connect the center of the diagram with each step of the process. At any point during the process, you may need to revise your thinking or your material if you learn new information about your audience.

An audience-centered introduction:

On any given day, we all deal with stress. When all of the homework, practices, rehearsals, and day-to-day stresses pile up, what we need most is a healthy and productive way to relax. Luckily all it takes is 10 minutes...and what's better, it requires you to do NOTHING. Mediation is a simple, effective, and most importantly, healthy activity that can change your life.

The first few sentences of this introduction appeal to the common causes of stress that every audience member (in this case, high school students) can identify with.

Then it presents a solution.

An audience-centered conclusion:

When I first learned about meditation it seemed like one of those "too good to be true" things that hippies loved to talk about. But once I started incorporating it into my daily routine, everything started to change. We often get comfortable with the things that make us uncomfortable, but we don't have to. Sometimes there are very simple things we can do to change our lives for the better and meditation is one of those things. It's simple, it's easy, it requires nothing from you and it may just give you everything in return.

Often, a strong audience-centered intro and conclusion will utilize words like "we", "us", "our" and "you".