Chapter 15: Informative Speaking

Meeting the Audience’s Informational Needs

Meeting your audience’s informational needs is important in various contexts. When you’re running a group meeting (Chapter 10), gauge what your audience already knows and make the content of the meeting relevant. No one wants to sit through a two-hour meeting on details of a situation that the group members already understand. And don’t make your topic—the reason you’ve gathered—seem confusing or irrelevant.

Effective speakers engage their listeners because they have made the effort to understand the needs of their audience members. In informative speaking, the object is for your audience to learn something new, so you want to avoid delivering a long list of facts that are already common knowledge. Understanding your listeners’ needs also involves choosing an appropriate topic and making that topic relevant to your listeners. Let’s take a look at these points using “malware” as an example.

Gauge what the audience already knows. Estimating the knowledge level of the audience helps determine where to begin, how much information to share, and at what level of difficulty the audience can understand and still maintain interest. If your goal is to inform an audience of fellow students about malware, for instance, you might assume that they have some experience with annoying computer viruses but that they may not know how to detect or remove malware from their own computers. In that case, your tasks would involve describing the types of malware (like Trojan horse viruses, adware, spyware, and so on), the functions of malware (for hackers), steps to prevent malware from disrupting their lives, and what to do if their computers are affected.

WHEN YOU’RE speaking to an audience that is knowledgeable about your topic, you don’t want to bore them with a long list of facts they already know. Tell them something new! Sam Edwards/Getty Images
Decide on an appropriate approach to the topic. Involving your listeners through the appropriate use of language and presentation aids gives them the impression that you have fine-tuned the speech just for them. You might present the story of the 2012 security breach at the City College of San Francisco, in which malware illegally transmitted personal data from up to one hundred thousand students to overseas hackers. Be sure to consider the different types of sources at your disposal: visual images, personal accounts, statistics, and expert testimony. These sorts of things will captivate your audience and help them remember the new information you are teaching them.
Make the topic relevant to each member of the audience. Always specifically connect the subject to the audience by pointing out how it is pertinent and useful to your listeners’ lives. For example, you might appeal to your audience members’ sense of injustice when you share stories of fellow students who have lost term papers—or worse—finances or personal identity information to malware. You can offer them peace of mind by offering suggestions to prevent hackers from accessing their personal information in the first place and on what to do should their private information be compromised.