Chapter
6
This ChapTer Will
help You• Describe various
audience motivations• Tell how demographicaudience analysis
helps you adapt your
topic to a particular
audience• Assess your listeners’
psychological profile• Explain how the situ-
ation, including time
and place, affects your
audience• Analyze your audi-
ence’s perception of
your credibility“AS A RESULT of my speech, my audience will understand how a hovercraft
works, tell some advantages and drawbacks, and explain why these vehicles
are not street legal.” Leif’s specific purpose statement lays out what he wants his
talk to accomplish. However, to meet his goals, he must use audience analysis
skills to think carefully about his listeners so that he can find the best way to
communicate with that group. In doing so, he becomes a listening speaker^1
who considers his audience before, during, and after his presentation.
Like Leif, your relationships with your audience consist of complex con-
nections among audience members, your topic, your situation, and yourself.
Figure 6.1 depicts these relationships as a rhetorical triangle with three sides—
audience, speaker, and situation—that converge around a message’s topic,ChaPter 6 Audience Analysis
Review the
chapter
Learning
Objectives
and Start
with a quick
warm-up
activity.
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