Using your Audience Analysis to Create a Speech
Once you have analyzed your audience and have a better idea of their level of knowledge of your topic, their interests, demographics, etc., you can make decisions about your speech’s content, examples, organization, language, and even title.
Content
Knowing the audience will help you adjust your topic. If you give a highly specialized lecture about something the audience knows little about, they will not understand and likely will give up listening. If you present the basics about a subject about which they are already fairly knowledgeable, they’ll get bored. While any audience analysis will not be perfect as each person is very different, you can deduce some generalizations based on your audience analysis that can assist your speech construction. Based on what you know, you can gauge which aspect of the topic will be most interesting to the group. You can focus on aspects to which the group can connect as well as leave out parts of the topic that they may already know or that will not encourage engagement with the content. If you’re adding research, you will have a clearer sense of what types of data they consider important. There may be research that holds particular significance to the group or famous people whom they admire.
For example, Angelo is presenting an online webinar about prison education programs. Since he collected some information when people signed up for the webinar, he knows where each participant comes from. There are groups of participants from five states: California, Arizona, Mississippi, Wisconsin, and Oregon. As he puts together the statistics for his presentation, he focuses on these states so that participants can relate these statistics to their own work at the state level. He also discusses the prison education programs already in place in these states so that the participants have an immediate point of connection.
In terms of pre-existing knowledge of a given topic, audiences will fall into a number of categories:
- Very little knowledge about the topic
- Some exposure to the topic
- Previously exposed to false information about the topic
- Knowledgeable about the topic
- Mixed Audience
Audience with Very Little Knowledge
If the audience knows very little about the subject you’re speaking about, you’ll need to help them create a foundation on which to build new knowledge (what education theorist David P. Ausubel calls an “advance organizer.”[1] Often, this foundation can be built with a metaphor or a comparison with something the audience already understands. If, in describing summer research you’ve been doing in the biology lab, you launch into a description of cellular biochemical reactions, you might lose your audience between “mitochondria” and “metabolic pathways.” Instead, you could use a metaphor like “Imagine that a kidney cell is a car. To make the car run we need fuel, right? The gas tank of our car is the cell’s mitochondria. Now imagine there’s a leak in the fuel line. What would happen?” and so on. By starting with knowledge the audience already has (a basic understanding of how a car works), you are helping them to attach new information to an existing structure of understanding.
Audience with Some Knowledge
When you’re confident that the audience has some understanding of the subject, you can start with their knowledge and build on it. For instance, let’s say the purpose of your speech is to inform the audience about the underappreciated role played by the inventor and actress Hedy Lamarr in developing technology that enabled Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and the cellular phone. Since your audience probably has some experience with these technologies, you could explain how they might function differently (or not at all) if Lamarr hadn’t come up with her method of sending a frequency-hopping signal.
Audience Previously Exposed to False Information
Countering misinformation is tricky. If the new information would replace facts that weren’t very important to the audience, or if the new information is more relevant or appealing than the knowledge it replaces, then the substitution can take place without much difficulty. However, if the facts you present contradict ideas that are highly significant to your listener, your information may be met with resistance. As the French West Indian psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon puts it:
Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against the belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief. [2]
Whenever you take on a subject area full of competing facts—various data sets and interpretations of that data—it’s wise to slow down; acknowledge the controversy; and make your case in a thoughtful, respectful, and unbiased way. Above all, you should avoid belittling those who hold the view you are contradicting. Stick to the facts and avoid overly political language. After all, this is a speech to inform, not to persuade. If your facts are sound, and you present them clearly, they should make your case more effectively than fiery rhetoric.
Very Knowledgeable Audience
If an audience is very knowledgeable about a topic, you can skip straight to the specifics and details. When giving a speech about cybersecurity to a room full of computer programmers, for instance, you wouldn’t have to explain what JavaScript is. Instead, you can get straight to the security exploit you’re concerned about.
Mixed Audience
A mixed audience, where some listeners are highly expert and others know very little about your topic, requires a different approach. In these situations, you can toggle back and forth between the basic information which keeps the beginners engaged and the more specialized information aimed at the experts. If you’re speaking in class about how to execute the perfect pick and roll, you may assume that some of your classmates have played basketball and others haven’t. For the ones who haven’t, you’ll have to explain the various positions and rules involved. For the avid basketball players, on the other hand, you should provide details that add to or go beyond their understanding of this move, so that they learn something from your speech as well.
In the following video, Dr. Talia Gershon explains quantum computers to five different audiences: a child, a teenager, a college computer science major, a graduate student, and an expert. Unless you’re interested in trying to wrap your head around quantum computing, it’s enough for our purposes to look at the first and last conversations: with the child and the expert. What do these conversations tell us about changing one’s presentation based on prior experience with and knowledge of the topic?
You can view the transcript for “Quantum Computing Expert Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty | WIRED” here (opens in new window).
Here’s the video with accurate captions: Quantum Computing Expert Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty | WIRED (opens in new window).
What to watch for
When talking with the child, Gershon uses a simple illustration to show how a quantum computer has different capabilities than a classical computer. With the expert, the conversation shifts much more to the practical side of working with quantum computers: “let’s talk about some of the things we think need to happen between now and fully fault-tolerant quantum computers,” Gershon says. You might think that the conversation would get more and more abstract as the level of expertise rises, but actually the opposite happens: the experts talk about the challenges, insights, and frustrations of working with concrete problems in the field, rather than just exchanging big ideas.
Note as well that with the non-experts, Gershon uses the Socratic method—using questions to draw the ideas out of the listener—whereas with the experts, we see a more standard interview style: answering the questions of the graduate student and conversing as knowledge-equals with the expert.
Examples
Example choices should be what the audience may know or may be of significance. Knowing your audience gives you specific items to look for in an example. The more your examples can speak to the experience and interests of your audience, the more likely these examples will be to resonate with them and get your point across.
For example, María Teresa is a teacher. She knows that her class of second graders has recently become interested in Pokémon cards. To teach the idea of testing a hypothesis, she presents them with a hypothesis: “the bigger a Pokémon is, the more Combat Points it has.” She then puts them in groups and gives each group a stack of Pokémon cards. The groups begin sorting, tabulating, and graphing data on the size and power of Pokémon. The lesson is a hit, and the students learn a lot about formulating and testing hypotheses.
Organization
Your speech can be organized in a way that will resonate with the audience. For some groups, an indirect approach is best, for others a direct style is valued. You will know better what choice to make regarding the organizational pattern.
For example, as part of a library program called “Books without Borders,” Gina is leading a book discussion group in a small town in Western Idaho. To start the discussion, Gina will offer a brief, ten-minute introduction to the first book in the series, Behold the Dreamers, by Imobolo Mbue. Since this audience might feel a long way from a Cameroonian immigrant family in New York City, Gina uses her introduction to sketch out the many ways that the book speaks to shared experiences in the United States, especially the vision and promise of the American Dream. Framed in this way, the discussion that follows is lively, insightful, and warmly received.
Language
Language is one of the key areas that audience analysis bolsters. Each group has a different way of communicating. Therefore, knowing who the group is will give you ideas on how to structure your language when addressing the group.
For example, Senzo is trying to get buy-in at his company for a donation-match program to increase employee’s charitable giving. He shifts his language and argument slightly, depending on which group of employees he’s talking to. With the engineers, he focuses on the tangible benefits of the program and discusses multiplier effects. With the accountants, he goes through the financial details of the proposal. And with colleagues in sales and marketing, he talks more abstractly about the ways a program like this can bolster the company’s image in the community. The donation-match program becomes a big success.
Title
It’s always a good idea to come up with a title once you have most of the content in place. Audience analysis allows you to create a title specifically for the group. The title should be something that excites them and makes them want to attend. A word of warning, though: if your title promises to address a topic, you need to make sure you actually discuss that topic.
For example, if an economist gives a highly technical speech the title “How to Get Rich Really Really Quick!,” some audience members might show up expecting a different talk than the one they get. A better title might be “How to Get Rich in One 64 Millionth of a Second: High Frequency Trading and Price Discovery in International Markets.”
The Science of Using Audience Analysis
Learning science tells us that “prior knowledge is the most important influence on what is learnt.”[3] In practice, this means that the more you can build on what your audience already knows, the more they will learn.
The best strategy for presenting new information then, is to do it in such a way that your audience can attach it to knowledge they already have. How you do this will depend on the audience’s level of knowledge (or what you assume their knowledge to be).
In this video, Michael Rivas and Cynthia Desrochers of California State University, Northridge discuss the important of connecting prior knowledge in teaching. The same concepts hold true for public speaking.
You can view the transcript for “Connecting Prior Knowledge – Gear 3” here (opens in new window).
What to watch for
Rivas’s example of using a rollercoaster to illustrate Newton’s first law of motion is a great example of how to connect higher-level concepts with the listeners’ experience. Earlier in the video, Desrochers illustrates the way prior knowledge works by talking about Apple products: “Many of us at home may have a Macbook Pro and then we got our iPhone. When the iPads came along, you know, we learned them quite quickly because we’d already established a neural pathway in the brain for how many of these Apple products work.” It’s a fine example to make her point, but it’s also an illustration of an important audience consideration when choosing examples. As we saw elsewhere, social class and income are two of the factors we need to think about when analyzing the audience. An example that starts with “many of us have a Macbook Pro and then we got our iPhone” is making a clear assumption about the buying power and consumer priorities of the audience—particularly because of the “we/us” formulation. Consider how this sentence might resonate differently for different audiences.
If this science interests you, you may want to view another video in which English teacher Nicole Brittingham Furlong discusses the learning science behind the need to connect new knowledge to prior knowledge.
You can view the transcript for “MOOC EDSCI1x | Video 4: Connecting Prior Knowledge | Memory and Learning” here (opens in new window).
- Ausubel, D. P. (1960). The Use of Advance Organizers in the Learning and Retention of Meaningful Verbal Material. Journal of Educational Psychology, 51(5), 267–272. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0046669 ↵
- Fanon, F. (2020). Black skin, white masks. Penguin Classics. ↵
- Kirschner, P. A., & Hendrick, C. (2020). How learning happens: seminal works in educational psychology and what they mean in practice. Routledge. ↵
