Audience analysis is defined as “Obtaining and evaluating information about your audience in order to anticipate their needs and interests and design a strategy to respond to them” (77). Audience adaptation is meant for the speaker to “adapt their messages to appeal to specific audiences” (77). They are both important and have similar goals. If the speaker doesn’t take the audiences views into hand, the audience may not relate, and become very bored. Some topics may be hard to design a strategy that would fit the audience. Take for example, our upcoming demonstration speeches. We will be demonstrating something with our hands, but to me there isn’t a specific way to make it appeal to the audience. Maybe adding humor would appeal, but I can’t think of anything that would change the way I designed my speech. I could see this process being helpful when delivering an informative or persuasive speech. It is important to know where the majority of your audience stands of their views. For example, if someone was to give a speech about legalizing gay marriage in a Christian church, the audience feedback would most likely be very unwelcoming.
Successful public speaking begins and ends with the audience, through audience analysis is the first step in an audience-centered approach to our speech. When I prepare my topic I like to ask the same question which we can find in the page 78:"How does what I'm going to say apply to me and fit with my experience and why is it necessary for my audience to know about it?"
ReplyDeleteAll our efforts should be directed to audience feedback through the smiling, nodding and making eye contact with us. Even in our upcoming demonstration speech we will be demonstrate something with our hands but if we will add humor as you said in post above it will be more interesting and it will help us not to lose eye contact but the humor shouldn't be distracted from the main idea of our speech. And it's easy when you know the majority of our audience stands of their views, but I think that only with the practice we can feel and see the audience even if they are nor familiar to us. Thank you for your post and the way how you think, it is very interesting.