104 6.4 AnAlyzing your Audience
can have a dog in the apartment.” Your message to your roommate is, “No worries
about you getting stuck with taking care of Martin if I go out of town. My friend,
who also lives in our apartment complex, has agreed to care for him when I’m
away.” You had the same goal for each audience—approval for having a dog in your
apartment—but you customized your message, tailoring your appeal to each lis-
tener based on the listener’s interests and concerns. You adapted to your audience.
When you are speaking in public, you should use the same process. The
principle is simple yet powerful: An effective public speaker is audience-
centered. The key questions in Table 6.1 can help you to formulate an effective
approach to your audience.
Being audience-centered does not mean that you should tell your listeners only
what they want to hear or that you should fabricate information simply to please your
audience or achieve your goal. If you adapt to your audience by abandoning your
own values and sense of truth, then you will become an unethical speaker rather
than an audience-centered one. It was President Truman who pondered, “I won-
der how far Moses would have gone if he’d taken a poll in Egypt?”^1 The audience-
centered speaker adjusts his or her topic, purpose, central idea, main ideas,
supporting materials, organization, and even delivery of the speech so as to
encourage the audience to listen to his or her ideas. The ethical speaker doesn’t
make up information jut to get what he or she wants. The goal is to make the
audience come away from the speaking situation if not persuaded, then at least
feeling thoughtful rather than offended or hostile.
In this overview of how to become an audience-centered speaker, we’ve
pointed out the importance of gathering information, analyzing it to establish
common ground, and then using the information to ethically adapt to your lis-
teners. Now we’ll discuss these ideas in more detail. You will want to gather and
analyze information and use it to adapt to your listeners at three stages of the
speechmaking process: before you speak, as you speak, and after you speak.Table 6.1 Audience-centered Adaptation
Consider Your Audience
• To whom am I speaking?
• What does my audience expect from me?
• What topic would be most suitable for my audience?
Consider Your Speech Goal
• What is my objective?
Consider Your Speech Content
• What kind of information should I share with my audience?
• How should I present the information to them?
• How can I gain and hold their attention?
• What kind of examples would work best?
Consider Your Delivery
• What language or linguistic differences do audience members have?
• What method of organizing information will be most effective?
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