Speaking with a sense of purpose, audience, and context
Before you decide what to say in a speech, consider your strategy: Identify your purpose (reason) for speaking, your audience (listeners), and the context (situation) in which you will speak.
What is my purpose?
To begin, think about what you want to accomplish with your talk or what you would like to occur as a result.
- Do you want to move an audience to action, for example, to change a university policy?
- Do you want to persuade people to see things in a certain way or to feel differently about some important issue, such as accommodating students with disabilities?
- Do you want to alert a community to an environmental threat, such as harmful runoff from new subdivisions?
- Do you want to congratulate your team on a successful campaign?
When you are thinking about purpose, you are mostly focused on strategy and not so much on content. You are thinking about what you want to do. What you want to say comes later.
Who is my audience?
Next think about audience. Effective speakers identify the needs and expectations of their audience and shape their material accordingly. Assess what your audience may already know and believe, what objections you might need to anticipate, and how you might interact with your listeners.
Ask yourself: Who is my audience? How should I interact with my listeners? Effective speakers find ways to connect to their listeners, to assure them that their feelings, beliefs, and ideas are understood and respected (appealing to pathos).
As you consider audience, you might realize that you will be speaking to people from different groups or cultures, so you will need to be careful about your assumptions and respectful of different beliefs.
What is the context?
Finally, think about the situation that surrounds your speech. You might be speaking within a political or religious context, for example. You need to be true to yourself and your values, but you don’t want to offend anyone in the audience.
Or you might be speaking within an environmental or a technical context. If you are presenting an argument about wind power, you might need to be alert to audience members who know that turbines kill many birds and also alter microclimates by affecting wind patterns in a region. In all cases, you want to your particular assumptions and point of view. Think about whether others would view things differently.
