Public Speaking Handbook

effective Listening 5.1 67

Considerable evidence also suggests that your own listening skills could be

improved. Within twenty-four hours after listening to a lecture or speech, you

will most likely recall only about 50 percent of the message. Forty-eight hours

later, you are above average if you remember more than 25 percent of the mes-

sage. Learning about listening can help you to improve your listening skills so

that you can gain more benefits from the speeches you hear.

In this chapter, we discuss how people listen, and we identify barriers

and pitfalls that keep both speakers and audiences from listening effectively.

Our goal is not only to help you remember what speakers say, but also to be a

more thoughtful, ethical, and critical listener to the messages you hear. We’ll

offer tips to improve your ability to analyze and evaluate speeches, including

your own.

Effective Listening

5.1 Describe the five stages of listening.

Listening is a complex process of selecting, attending to, creating meaning from,

remembering, and responding to verbal and nonverbal messages. Understand-

ing these components of listening can help you to retain more, and it can help

you to be a better speaker and a better listener. And research confirms that good

listening skills can improve the quality of both your life and your career.^2

Select

To select a sound, the first stage of listening, is to single out a message from sev-

eral competing messages. As a public speaker, your job is to develop a message

that motivates listeners to focus on your message.

Attend

The sequel to selecting is attending. To attend to a sound is to focus on it. Most

people’s average attention span while listening to someone talk is about 8 seconds.^3

One of your key challenges as a public speaker is to capture and then hold your

audience’s attention. Your choice of supporting material is often the key to gaining

and maintaining attention.

Understand

Boiled down to its essence, communication is the process of understanding,

or making sense of our experiences and sharing that sense with others.^4 As a

speaker, your job is to help your listeners understand by making sure you clearly

explain your ideas in terms and images to which your listeners can relate. Again,

the challenge of being understood comes back to a focus on the audience.

5.1

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