Let the audience drive your message.

You’re standing with a crowd on the street, waiting for a speech from a woman who has decided to run for a seat in Congress. You heard her speak last week at your college, where she rallied student support for her candidacy, and you found her presentation quite convincing. You’re now excited to vote for her because she seems to genuinely care about the issues important to you, appears well-informed, and would do much to benefit students like you.

Today this candidate is addressing a larger group of voters, many of whom are students from your campus. Soon after she begins her speech, however, you find yourself feeling surprised and annoyed. She’s covering the exact same topics she addressed during last week’s speech, even using some of the same hand gestures! You exchange glances with several of your dorm-mates, who roll their eyes and start to wander off. But even as members of the crowd walk away or shift their weight restlessly, the speaker plows forward with her talk, making no adjustments to her delivery style or content. She seems oblivious to the fact that she has lost much of her audience’s attention. Apparently, she failed to analyze her audience—for whatever reason, she didn’t realize she’d be addressing many of the same students from the week before.

Perhaps you have experienced generic speeches—canned presentations delivered in exactly the same way every time, no matter the audience or setting. When a speaker just “phones in” a speech, listeners usually react with boredom, irritation, and lack of attention. Audience members lose, because they stop listening and miss out on any valuable information the speaker might be sharing. The presenter also loses, because he or she gets a reputation for being insensitive or dull.

By contrast, speakers who tailor their message to their listeners create enormous value for their audience and themselves, in some of the following ways:

Audience analysis is used in more than just public speaking. Even in everyday conversation, we continually shape our messages as we focus on the people we’re talking to; therefore, it’s not surprising that this skill is highly important in the context of public speaking. To learn about your audience before developing your speech, you will need to gather various kinds of information about your listeners.

In this chapter, we organize the types of information you will need to gather into the following categories: situational characteristics, demographics, common ground, prior exposure, and audience disposition. We also provide some tips for gathering these details, as well as suggestions for what to do if you discover halfway through a speech that you’ve misread your audience.