strategies to enhance audience Understanding 15.3 327
that helps your listeners to form a mental image by appealing to their senses of
sight, taste, smell, sound, and touch. The How To box walks you through in-
structions for developing effective word pictures.
Be sure to describe the emotions that a listener might feel if he or she were
to experience the situation you relate. Ultimately, your goal is to use just the
right words to evoke an emotional response from the listener. If you experienced
the situation, describe your own emotions. Use specific adjectives rather than
general terms such as happy or sad. One speaker, talking about receiving her first
speech assignment, described her reaction with these words:
My heart stopped. Panic began to rise up inside. Me?... For the next five
days I lived in dreaded anticipation of the forthcoming event.^10
Note how effectively her choices of such words and phrases as “my heart
stopped,” “panic,” and “dreaded anticipation” describe her terror at the prospect
of making a speech—much more so than if she had said simply, “I was scared.”
The more vividly and accurately you can describe emotion, the more inti-
mately involved in your description the audience will become.
Appeal to a Variety of Learning Styles
Would you rather hear a lecture, read the lecture, or see pictures about what the
speaker is saying? Your choice reflects your preferred learning style. Not every-
one has a single preferred style, but many people do. Four common styles are
auditory, visual print, visual, and kinesthetic.
• Auditory learners. If you would rather listen to a recorded audio book than
read a book, you may be an auditory learner, a person who learns best by
hearing.
• Visual print learners. If you learn best by seeing words in print, then you are
a visual print learner. Most likely you would much rather read material than
hear it presented orally.Paint a Word Picture
• Imagine it. Begin by forming your own clear mental image of the person, place, or object
before you try to describe it. See it with your “mind’s eye.”
• Sense it. Examine the details of your mental image. What would listeners see if they were
looking at it? What would listeners hear? If they could touch it, how would it feel to them? If
your listeners could smell or taste it, what would that be like?
• Describe it. To describe these sensations, choose the most specific and vivid words possible.
Onomatopoeic words—words that sound like the sounds they name—such as buzz, snort,
hum, crackle, or hiss are powerful. So are similes and other comparisons. “The rock was rough
as sandpaper” and “the pebble was as smooth as a baby’s skin” appeal to both the visual and
tactile senses.HOW TO