Know+Your+Audience

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Rhetoric 104: Know Your Audience The First Rule of Rhetoric [|By Guy Bergstrom] It's easy to fall into the trap of writing what you'd like to read, or giving the speech you'd want to hear. But the audience isn't you.

Most public figures are experts in their field. A county sheriff can tell you all about police procedures and flaw in the criminal justice system. A professional football player can confuse the average person with defensive schemes and terminology from his team's playbook. Politicians can get lost in the weeds of policy wonkitude and legislative maneuvering. The first question to ask before writing any speech or oped isn't to ask about the topic. **Ask about the audience.**

Most people tend to think about the audience when it comes to speeches. That's a mistake. It's also useful for any type of communication, whether it's a radio talk show appearance or an editorial board. Know your audience. **1) How much does the audience know?** Think about the age and educational level of the audience, and how much they know about the topic.

A public figure may have given a speech just last week about the same topic -- let's say it's global warming -- and the temptation is to dust that speech off and do it again. Except the speech you'd give to a room full of environmental science professors is a completely different animal than what you'd say in the gymnasium of Hartford Valley Elementary School or to the editorial board of the local newspaper. **2) How long?** Length is a killer. Double-check how long the speech is supposed to be, then triple-check it.

<span style="color: #5f0fb0; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 25px; text-align: left;">A common problem is arbitrarily long speeches.

<span style="color: #5f0fb0; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 25px; text-align: left;">If there's a convention and the schedulers see they have an hour to fill, they figure it's no big deal to tell the keynote speaker to do 45 minutes. Except nobody should talk for 45 minutes, not unless they're the president of the United States and it's the State of the Union address. Even then, 45 minutes is probably too long; 30 minutes is better. <span style="color: #5f0fb0; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 25px; text-align: left;">It's smart to run shorter than expected. You can always fill five or ten minutes at the end by taking questions from the audience, which most audiences really enjoy.

<span style="color: #5f0fb0; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 25px; text-align: left;">The worst thing is to run long. The structure of speeches is such that you're building to a climax, the big finish, where you inspire people to get up and help do great things for a wonderful cause, and you can't chop off the last five minutes of that speech without mortally wounding it.

<span style="color: #5f0fb0; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 25px; text-align: left;">**3) How friendly -- or unfriendly -- is the audience?** <span style="color: #5f0fb0; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 25px; text-align: left;">There are three kinds of audiences: friendly, neutral and hostile.

<span style="color: #5f0fb0; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 25px; text-align: left;">There's also **three steps to persuasion:** changing their mood, changing their mind and getting them to act.

<span style="color: #5f0fb0; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 25px; text-align: left;">You could give three different speeches on the same exact issue to three audiences that are nearly identical in age and education.

<span style="color: #5f0fb0; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 25px; text-align: left;">With the hostile audience, it's a victory to simply change their mood.

<span style="color: #5f0fb0; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 25px; text-align: left;">With a neutral audience, it's great if you changed their mind and maybe inspired a few of them to act.

<span style="color: #5f0fb0; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 25px; text-align: left;">With a friendly audience, it's a waste of time to build the case and try to change their mood or their mind; you're pushing an open door. This type of speech or oped should focus on getting them to actually do something. <span style="color: #5f0fb0; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 25px; text-align: left;">__<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #2a6496; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 15px;">[] __ <span style="color: #5f0fb0; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 25px; text-align: left;"> <span style="color: #5f0fb0; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 25px; text-align: left;"> <span style="color: #5f0fb0; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 25px; text-align: left;"> <span style="color: #5f0fb0; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 25px; text-align: left;"><span style="color: #1a6a8c; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 35px;">Define your target audience, and how you will address them <span style="color: #1a6a8c; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 35px;">Some ways of thinking of audience if your are.... > what style of writing will appeal to them? > how would your vocabulary change if your audience were children? > visitors from another country? your parents? > how would you detail the facts of a crime you witnessed?
 * <span style="color: #1a6a8c; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 35px;">selling a product:
 * <span style="color: #1a6a8c; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 35px;">explaining a sport:
 * <span style="color: #1a6a8c; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 35px;">documenting an event: