COMM1002 Public Speaking: Unit 1 Vocabulary

Critical Thinking

The application of logical principles, rigorous standards of evidence, and careful reasoning to the analysis and discussion of claims, beliefs, and issues.

Rhetoric

The art of using language, especially public speaking, as a means to persuade.

Culture

The arts, customs, and habits that characterize a particular society or nation; the beliefs, values, behavior, and material objects that constitute a people's way of life.

Empathy

The capacity to understand another person's point of view or the result of such understanding.

Demographics

The characteristics of population such as age, gender, sexual orientation, occupation, education; classification of the characteristics of the people.

Judgment

The evaluation of evidence in the making of a decision.

Scope

The extent of the area or subject matter that something deals with or to which it is relevant.

Receiving Stage

The first stage of the listening process, which involves hearing and attending.

Responding Stage

The listening stage wherein the listener provides verbal and/or nonverbal reactions to what she hears.

Channel

The method a sender uses to send a message to a receiver. The most common channels humans use are auditory and visual.

Religious Pluralism

The peaceful coexistence of multiple religions in a community.

Situational Awareness

The perception of environmental elements with respect to time and/or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status after some variable has changed, such as time, or some other variable, such as a predetermined event.

Vividness Effect

The phenomenon of how vivid or highly graphic and dramatic events affect an individual's perception of a situation.

Hearing

The physiological process of registering sound waves as they hit the eardrum.

Metacognition

"Cognition about cognition", or "knowing about knowing. " It can take many forms, including knowledge about when and how to use particular strategies for learning or for problem solving.

Message

A communication, or what is communicated; any concept or information conveyed.

Thesis

A concise summary of the argument or main points, usually one to three sentences long.

Demographic

A demographic criterion: a characteristic used to classify people for statistical purposes, such as age, race, or gender.

Technology

A device, material, or sequence of mathematical coded electronic instructions created by a person's mind that is built, assembled, or produced and which is not part of the natural world.

Interest

A great attention and concern from someone or something; intellectual curiosity.

Secondary Group

A large group involving formal and institutional relationships. Secondary relationships involve weak emotional ties and little personal knowledge of one another.

Race

A large group of people distinguished from others on the basis of common physical characteristics, such as skin color or hair type.

Brainstorming

A method of problem solving in which individuals or members of a group contribute ideas spontaneously.

Active Listening

A particular communication technique that requires the listener to provide feedback on what he or she hears to the speaker.

Expert

A person with extensive knowledge or ability in a given subject.

Leadership

A process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task.

Questionnaire

A questionnaire is a type of survey consisting of a series of questions and other prompts for the purpose of gathering information from respondents.

Rating Scale

A rating scale is a set of categories designed to elicit information about an attribute. In the social sciences, common examples are the Likert scale and 1-10 rating scales in which a person selects the number which is considered to reflect the perceived quality of a product.

Purpose

A result that is desired; an intention.

Face

A sense of self-worth or self-esteem, especially in the eyes of others.

Conflict of Interest

A situation in which someone in a position of trust, such as a lawyer, politician, or director of a corporation, has competing professional or personal interests.

Orator

A skilled and eloquent public speaker.

Primary Group

A small social group whose members share personal and lasting relationships. The family is the most important primary group.

Heterosexism

A system of attitudes, bias, and discrimination in favor of opposite-sex sexuality and relationships. It can include the presumption that everyone is heterosexual or that opposite-sex attractions and relationships are the only norm and therefore superior.

Object

A thing that has physical existence.

Persuasive

Able to induce to believe by appealing to reason or understanding; convincing.

Mediated

Acting or brought about through an intervening agency.

Publicity

Advertising or other activities designed to rouse public interest in something.

Ageism

Ageism, or age discrimination is stereotyping and discriminating against individuals or groups because of their age. It is a set of beliefs, attitudes, norms, and values used to justify age based prejudice, discrimination, and subordination.

Computer-Assisted Web Interviewing

An Internet surveying technique in which the interviewer follows a script provided in a website. The questionnaires are made in a program for creating web interviews. The program is able to customize the flow of the questionnaire based on the answers provided, as well as information already known about the participant.

Audience Analysis

An audience analysis involves the study of the pertinent elements defining the makeup and characteristics of your audience.

Bias

An inclination towards something; predisposition, partiality, prejudice, preference, predilection.

Concept

An understanding retained in the mind, from experience, reasoning and/or imagination; a generalization (generic, basic form), or abstraction (mental impression), of a particular set of instances or occurrences (specific, though different, recorded manifestations of the concept).

Audience-Centered

Audience-centered contrasts with speaker-centered. When preparing a message the source analyzes the audience in order to adapt the content and language usage to the level of the listeners.

Constructive

Carefully considered and meant to be helpful.

Ethnicity

Characteristics of a group of people thought to have common ancestry who share a distinctive culture.

Generation

Cohorts of people who were born in the same date range and share similar cultural experience.

Audience

One or more people within hearing range of some message; for example, a group of people listening to a performance, speech etc. ; the crowd attending a stage performance.

Specific

Explicit or definite.

Education

Facts, skills, and ideas that have been learned, either formally or informally.

Knowledge

Familiarity or understanding of a particular skill, branch of learning, etc.

General

Giving or consisting of only the most important aspects of something, ignoring minor details; indefinite.

Expertise

Great skill or knowledge in a particular field or hobby.

Irreligious

Irreligious describes an absence of any religion; where as anti-religion describes an active opposition or aversion toward religions in general.

Ethnocentrism

Judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one's own culture.

Recall

Memory; the ability to remember.

Tangential

Merely touching, referring to a tangent, only indirectly related.

Non-Verbal Communication

Non-verbal communication is usually understood as the process of communication through sending and receiving wordless (mostly visual) cues between people. Messages can be communicated through gestures and touch, by body language or posture, by facial expression and eye contact.

Formative

Of or pertaining to the formation and subsequent growth of something acquired.

Ethical

Of or relating to the accepted principles of right and wrong, especially those of some organization or profession.

Summative

Of, pertaining to, or produced by summation. The adding up of what has been learned or what knowledge has been acquired at the end of lesson or presentation.

Sophist

One of a class of teachers of rhetoric, philosophy, and politics in ancient Greece, especially one who used fallacious but plausible reasoning.

Collectivism

Philosophic, political, religious, economic, or social outlook that stresses the priority of group goals over individual goals and the importance of cohesion within social groups.

Egocentrism

Preoccupation with one's own internal world; the belief that one's own opinions or interests are the most important or valid.

Informative

Providing knowledge, especially useful or interesting information.

Religion

Religion is a collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and worldviews that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values.

Sender

Someone who encodes and sends a message to a receiver through a particular channel; the initiator of communication.

Topic

Subject; theme; a category or general area of interest.

Pathos

That quality or property of anything which touches the feelings or excites emotions and passions, esp., that which awakens tender emotions, such as pity, sorrow, and the like; contagious warmth of feeling, action, or expression; pathetic quality.

Memory

The ability of an organism to record information about things or events with the facility of recalling them later at will.

Networking

The act of meeting new people in a business or social context.

Plagiarism

The act of plagiarizing; the copying of another person's ideas, text or other creative work, and presenting it as one's own, especially without permission.

Listening

The active process by which we make sense of, assess, and respond to what we hear.

Open-Minded

Willing to consider new and different ideas or opinions.

Attending

The process of accurately identifying particular sounds as words.

Favorability

The quality or degree of being viewed favorably.

Feedback

The receivers' verbal and nonverbal responses to a message, such as a nod for understanding (nonverbal), a raised eyebrow for being confused (nonverbal), or asking a question to clarify the message (verbal).

Gender

The socio-cultural phenomenon of the division of people into various categories, such as "male" and "female," with each having associated clothing, roles, stereotypes, etc.

Understanding Stage

The stage of listening during which the listener determines the context and meanings of the words that are heard.

Remembering Stage

The stage of listening wherein the listener categorizes and retains the information she's gathering from the speaker.

Evaluating Stage

The stage of the listening process during which the listener critically assesses the information she's received from the speaker.

Psychographics

The study of personality, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles; not to be confused with demographic variables such as age and gender.

Ethics

The study of principles relating to right and wrong conduct.

Context

The surroundings, circumstances, environment, background, or settings that determine, specify, or clarify the meaning of an event or other occurrence.

Confirmation Bias

The tendency to pick out aspects of a conversation that support our one's own preexisting beliefs and values.

Comprehension

The totality of intentions or attributes, characters, marks, properties, or qualities, that the object possesses; the totality of intentions that are pertinent to the context of a given discussion.

Heteronormativity

The view that all human beings are either male or female, both in sex and in gender, and that sexual and romantic thoughts and relations are normal only when between people of different sexes.

Diction

The writer's or the speaker's distinctive vocabulary choices and style of expression in a poem or story.

Inform

To communicate knowledge to others.

Recuse

To declare oneself disqualified to act.

Assess

To determine, estimate or judge the value of; to evaluate.

Toast

To engage in a salutation and/or accompanying raising of glasses while drinking alcohol (or other appropriate beverage) in honor of someone or something.

Co-Located

To locate or be located at the same site, for two things or groups at the same space.

Narrow

To reduce in width or extent; to contract.

Persuade

To successfully convince someone to agree to, accept, or do something, usually through reasoning and verbal influence.

Decode

To translate the sender's spoken idea/message into something the receiver understands by using his or her knowledge of language based on personal experience.

Encode

To turn one's ideas into spoken language in order to transmit them to listeners.

Transgender

Transgender is the state of one's "gender identity" (self-identification as woman, man, neither or both) not matching one's "assigned sex" (identification by others as male, female or intersex based on physical/genetic sex).

Noise

Various sounds, usually unwanted.

Instrumental

the instructor is responsible for making sure they are understood