Thursday, February 16, 2012
Week 4, Question 2
Audience analysis is key in a successful speech. This takes place in the early stages of your planning process (if you are well prepared) :) In doing this ahead of time it will save you a huge headache and also ensure that your audience is more focused and interested in your speech. I would consider age, common interests of that age group, gender, ethnicity, etc. For example, if you had a room full of college students, you wouldn't want to speak on the benefits of AARP, and if you had an audience of retired individuals, you wouldn't want to be speaking on STD's or college clubs. With that being said, audience adaptation. This is, what I believe, to be the part where, once you are speaking, you judge how the audience is responding to what you have to say. Based on your analysis of this, you can make adjustments in your presentation. If you notice they are yawning, staring in to space, or doing other things, you need to liven it up a bit, as best you can, depending on the material. If you notice they are responding in a sour or way of discomfort, try and change your approach in presenting the material if you can. Eye contact with your audience is key in determining this information. If you are constantly looking at a power point or your note cards, you will not have an accurate analysis
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I think is great that you mentioned the situation when you have to adapt your speech to your audience as you go. Personally, I believe this could be somewhat difficult for inexperience speakers (like me). When I prepare a speech I tried to stick to what I have prepared, changing what I'm saying because they audience is showing a negative reaction would definitely present a challenge for me. Hopefully as this semester progresses I'll be comfortable enough to be able to make changes to my speech without all falling apart. It will probably take practice but I believe that doing an audience analysis before the speech would definitely take some pressure off.
ReplyDeleteI like the way you talk about monitoring audiences and then adjusting the speech's materials during speech. The tone sounds very interesting for me. I guess you might a professorial speaker, who is quite confident of her topic and caring of her audiences. When I read you said, "If you notice they are yawning, starting in to space......,” My mind emerges the video of the "Drinking", that some our classmates have lost interesting to this speech after few minutes. Therefore, I thought if he has read your post, he would make adjustments in his materials or change his presenting attitude to adapt his audiences.
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