Many times a subject may have many different interested parties but by presenting it in a certain fashion may get those peoples attention. Before presenting information, the first step is to narrow the purpose, then identify your audiences. After selecting an audience the presenter should take a closer look at chosen audience. If these steps are maintained the presenters point should be taken a lot more seriously.
Identifying the Purpose
What information are you trying to convey, or what do you want them to learn. Then you need to decide how you are going to persuade the target to believe in what you are trying to get them to learn.
Identifying the Audience
Before you are doing any kind of research on your audience you must select one of the 3 different kinds
Initial- the person that you tell your information to. Primary- Who the information is intended for.
Secondary- other people who are affect by what you presented
Analyzing Audience
After selecting an audience you will want to study them to be able to come up with the best strategy for presenting the information.
Here are some things that you want to look at when analyzing an audience.
Context- Is how they will interpret the information
Purpose and Motivation- Will allow you to increase receptivity and decrease resistance
Prior Knowledge- so you don’t bore them or loose them.
Reading level- How complex of information they are able to understand
Organizational Role
How the categorize their company (2 ways)
Hierarchical- Boss-->managers-->workers
Non hierarchical – Bosses=managers=workers
13 comments:
It is very important to gain the audiences attention and keep them interested. If the audience isn't captured by your presentation technique the chances are low that they will retain any knowledge from it. No one wants to listen to a monotone professor for five minutes let alone an hour or more. Been there done that and I loathed going to the class everyday.
In conversation, non-verbal comunnication can be a very useful tool to use. It can sometimes get the point across easier. Whe using non-verbal communication, it is important to decide whether or not the audience is responding to what you have to say. If you ignore the response of the audience, then sometimes the non-verbal communication can be more distracting than anything.
This chapter seemed relatively familiar to me because I was on the speech team in both high school and college. A critical aspect in giving a successful speech was figuring out who your audience was and tailoring your delivery to maximize the affect you had on them. So, it was good to re-familiarize myself with the necessary steps it takes to identify your audience.
I feel that it is very important to know your audience because if you communicate your purpose to far above their heads or simplify it too much you'll lose them quickly. If I were to error though I would on the side of simple because with today's knowledge explosion we forget a lot of information and its nice to refresh the memory every now and then.
Target audience is an extremely important factor to consider when attempting to get information across. Once the audience is chosen, another key aspect is to figure out how much information to give them. In some scenarios it is only necessary to give them enough information to keep them interested while other times an audience may need a lot more information to make a decision.
Personally, I think this chapter was one of the most important chapters because being able to target your audiences will assist you in conveying what you need to get across. Therefore, being the speaker, you must get the audience excited and entertained at the same time about your subject to thoroughly express what you are attempting to communicate.
I understand the importance of gaining and keeping an audiences attention. I think of all the presentations I have given in the last few years. If your not one of the first few to present no one cares to hear what you have to say and it makes it a lot harder to present when no one is paying attention and all they want it to leave.
I think it is very important that with our audiences we need to keep them interested and in order to do so we have to learn about them and figure out the different ways they learn.I just had a class that talked about "learning the learners" Everybody learns and is interested in different ways and so I think that it's important to know what kind of groups you are targeting and figure out different ways to make our presentation appealing to them. It will also make the presentation successful and hopefully your audience will get the most of it, which is what the goal should be.
With my job that I have currently, I run a lot of meetings and presentations. The worst feeling in the world is having the Architect and Owner lose concentration on what you are saying. I make sure this doesn't happen by using many different things. Visuals, joke, and join along practices all get my audience into what you're presenting. Get involved and they will stay involved, and you won't feel like an idiot after the presentation.
Andrew literally spoke out exactly what I was about to say. I feel like I'm an okay public speaker, but I get easily distracted when I see one of my audiences is not paying attention. And thus, to prevent this from happening, I also like to use a lot of visuals, rather than text, and say funny things, so that people are not dead bored. Also I try to say things that are more general to the whole audience than a select group of people. Also, like the chapter says, I feel more comfortable when speaking in front of an audience, when I know my audience, i.e. when I know, what the audience will like and dislike.
I agree that addressing the audiences is a very good thing to know, since i have only really had to give speeches in speech class. And that audience was usually very non threatening to me and quite informal. Also the audience usually had no previous knowledge of what I was giving my speeches on, so to actually write a technical document to a group of professionals or experts I would have a difficult time. I also had never heard of a secondary audience.
Agreed. If the audience is not considered, then you will not effectively give the information, if the information is given at all. Research on the audience is almost always required to properly address the audience.
Making sure what you are writing fits the audience that you are writing to is very important. It would be terrible to go present a pro-choice speech in front of a pro-life audience. Make sure you are precise in your message and stick to it. Wandering off message will only confuse your point.
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