A Pocket Guide to Public Speaking Part 1-3 (5th edition)
Analyze the Audience
- Process of gathering and analyzing information about your listeners with the explicit aim of adapting your message to the information you uncover. -Pick topic or assigned topic. -Our values shape our belifes, which shape our attitudes, whihc shape our action. -Values. Is people's most enduring judgements about what is good and bad in life. -Beliefs. It is the ways in which people perceive reality. -Attitudes. It shows the way someone will respond to people, ideas, objects, or events in evaluative ways in a negative or positive way.
Identify What Make You Anxious
-Anxiety is state of uneasiness brought by fear. -Lacking positive mindset, lack of experience, feeling inferior, and being center of attention can bring onset of public-speaking anxiety, which is a situation-specific social anxiety arising from oral presentation anticipation.
Demonstrate Respect for Difference
-Audience members want to feel speaker address needs and interest at heart, and feel recognized and included in message. -Public speaker must address diverse audience with sensitivity and respect differences in culture and identity. -Striving for inclusion will bring you closer to goal of establishing genuine connection with audience.
Draw on Composition Skills
-Both public speaking and writing focus on audience. -Both often require research, topic, credible evidence, effective transitions, and persuasive appeals. -Both organize thoughts into intro, clear thesis, supporting ideas, and conclusion.
Speaking in Public
-An acquired skill that improves by practicing. -In common with writing and conversing.
Learn from Feedback.
-Learn through self-evaluation, but it could be distorted. -It's better to learn through objective evaluations.
Types of Outlines
1. Working outline. Are points stated in close-to-complete sentences. 2. Speaking outline. Are briefer and use short phrases or key words.
Two other factors critical to delivering a speech
-Contexts and goals. 1. Context. Is anything influencing the speaker that will influence the speech such as audience or occasion, and is the situation that called the need for a speech in the first place. - All speeches delivered as a response to rhetorical situation, which is a circumstance calling for a public response, which helps maintain audience-centered perspective, which is keeping in mind the values, needs, etc. of the audience. 2. Goals. Is the purpose of a speech, which is what you want audience to learn or do as a result, which is the final prerequisite for a good speech.
Activate the Relaxation Response
-Flight or fight response is the body's automatic response as a result of threatening or fear-inducing events. -Counteract response with relaxation response. -Stretch away stress. -Use stress-control breathing by inhaling through belly and exhaling through chest. Stage 1 is normal belly-to-chest breathing and stage 2 is the same but with a soothing word.
Public Forum
-Greeks used Agora while Romans used Forum. -Forum is a variety of venues for discussion of issues of public interest. -Held in town halls or virtually. -Provides exposure to audience and builds confidence.
Demographics
-Is the statistical characteristics of a given population. 1. Age. Is the generational identity in which an individual belongs to, such as millennials, and generation Z. 2. Ethnic or cultural. Is the co-culture, or social community whose perspectives and style of communicating differ significantly from yours. 3. Socioeconomic status. It includes income, occupation, and education. 4. Religion. 5. Political affiliation. Is the political values and beliefs. 6. Gender. Is our social and psychological sense of ourselves as males or females; avoid gender stereotyping. 7. Group affiliation. Is groups to which audience members belong to, which reflect their interests, and values, thus providing insight into what they care about. -Be sensitive to disability when analysing an audience.
Gauge
-Is topic new to listeners? -Do they know little about topic? -Are attitudes different than yours about the topic? -Are they negatively or positively predisposed to topic? -Captive audience. Is an audience required to hear speaker are less positively disposed. -Voluntary audience. Is an audience who attend out of free will. -Identify target audience, which are individuals within audience whom are most likely to influence in the direction you seek.
Employers Seek
-Leadership ability. -Teamwork skills. -Written & Verbal communication skills. -Problem solving skills. -Honesty and integrity. -Initiative. -Strong work ethic. -Technical & computer skills. -Interpersonal skills -Analytic/quantitative skills. -Flexibility/adaptability.
Listener's Attention
-More likely to sustain listener's attention if you can uncover attitudes, beliefs, and values. -A.K.A feelings or emotional or thinking response. -People are more interested in topics they have a positive attitude towards, which means they want you to tell them what they want to hear.
What distinguishes sought-after candidates?
-Not "hard" knowledge of major. -But "soft" superior communication. -Surveys of managers and executives say oral and written communication are most important skills for new hires.
Find New Opportunities for Civic Engagement
-Offers public conversation about social concerns and be an engaged citizen. -Gives you a voice to be heard. -Judge and take action for or against large civic issues. -Too many people leave decisions to media and politicians. -35% don't vote excluding presidential election and 22% of 35% are 18 to 29 year olds. -When citizens speak up, democracy functions better and truly reflects the will of the people.
Strategies to Reduce Anxiety
-Prepare and practice. -Modify thoughts and attitudes to positive ones that will lower heart rate. -Envision speech as a conversation. -Enjoy the occasion. -Move as you speak. -Concentrate on message itself and not on yourself. -Accept nervousness as normal. -Practice gestures. -Visualize success by practicing the summoning of feelings and actions that are consistent with successful performance. -Breathe.
Enhance Career as a Student
-Preping speeches uses numerous skills. * such as research, write about topics, analyze audience, outline, organize, and support claims. -Used for english to engineering.
Elements in Communication Process
-Process needs to be complete in order to perform well. 1. Source. Is the sender who creates and sent message. 2. Channel. The medium chosen for delivery. 3. Encoding. Is the process of converting thoughts into words. 4. Message. Is the content such as thoughts and ideas put into meaningful expressions, expressed verbally and nonverbally. 5. Receiver. Is the audience who receives the message. 6. Decoding. Interpret the message sent. 7. Feedback. The audience's response verbally and nonverbally. 8. Noise. Is any physical, psychological, or environmental interference with the message. 9. Shared meaning. Is mutual understanding between speaker and audience, which determines the level of understanding.
Oral Style
-Spoken language is simpler, rhythmic, repetitious, inclusive, and interactive than written language. -Speakers follow familiar words and easy-to-follow sentences. -Repetition of key words or phrases is key to helping listeners follow along. -Specific references to self and to audience allows members of audience to know how speaker feels, thinks, and relates.
Public Speaking
-Vital life skill. -Give unmistakeable edge. -Potent weapon in career development. -Sharpens ability to reason and think critically.
Roots of Public Speaking
-Was known as rhetoric or oratory. -Flourished in Greek city-state in 5th century B.C.E. -Did effective speeches, particularly persuasive ones. -Athens was site of world's first direct democracy and public speaking allowed it to succeed. -Agora is a meeting in a public square. -Greek rhetoric speaker is Aristotle and Roman statesman and orator is Cicero
Draw on Conversational Skills
-When you talk to a friend you automatically check for understanding, adjust meaning/language accordingly, and you tend to discuss issues appropriate to circumstances. -When a stranger becomes involved in conversation you first get to know interests and attitudes before expressing strong opinions. -In conversations, instinctive adjustments are made to fit the audience, topic, and occasion. -Both conversationalists and public speakers uncover audience's interests and needs before speaking.
Overview of Speech
1. Analyze Audience. Is to consider audience interests, etc. that will influence response to topic, speaker, and occasion; learn through demographics, questionnaires, and interviews so that you can choose a topic and create a draft accordingly. 2. Select a topic. Is to, unless it is assigned, decide topic by considering occasion and self-motivation; choose a topic suitable to audience's needs. 3. Determine the speech purpose. Is to direct speech towards an informative, persuasive, or special occasion style. 4. Compose a thesis statement. Is to clearly express central idea and identifies to audience in one sentence. General purpose + specific purpose = thesis 5. Develop main points. Is to make 2 to 3 main points, whether primary pieces of knowledge or key claims. 6. Gather Supporting Materials. Is to support main points with personal experiences to every conceivable external source. 7. Separate speech into major parts. Is to develop intro, body, and conclusion separately then bring them together using transition statements. 8. Outline the speech. Is to arrange elements based on coordination and sub coordination; coordinate points have equal importance and are parallel on paper, while subordinate have less weight and are centered to the right of the paper on paper. 9. Consider presentation aids. It helps audience understand points. 10. Practice delivering speech. It is necessary for successful speech, and feel and appear natural; suggested to practice at least 6 times. Practice facial & gesture expression and eye contact.
4 forms of human communication
1. Dyadic communication. Is between two people in a conversation. 2. Small group communication. Is a small number of people who see and speak directly with one another. 3. Mass communication. Is between a speaker and large audience with unknown people not present with speaker or part of immense crowd, and there is little to no interaction between speaker and listener. 4. Public speaking. Is when a speaker delivers a message with a specific purpose to an audience who is present during delivery of speech.
Income, Occupation, and Education
1. Income. It determines people's experiences on many levels. 2. Occupation. It determines politics, economy, education, social status, personal attitudes, beliefs, and goals. 3. Education. It strongly influences perspectives and abilities because high-level education leads to increase in lifetime earnings, health benefits, and a greater civic engagement, and depending on level will help adjust topics to more higher or lower level of sophistication with fewer or more examples and illustrations.
Types of Speeches
1. Informative. New information, new insights, new ways, of thinking about a topic. 2. Persuasive. Intended to influence the attitudes, values, beliefs, and actions of others. 3. Special occasion. Prepare for a specific occasion and for a specific purpose for that occasion.
Major Parts of Speech
1. Introduction. It gains the audience's attention and interest by introducing topic, speaker, and thesis. 2. Body. It contains main points and subpoints arranged in a manner to support thesis. 3. Conclusion. It restates thesis and shows how those main points confirmed it.
Greek and Roman teachers' divided process of speech into 5 parts
1. Invention. Is the discovering types of evidence and arguments used to make case. 2. Arrangement. Is organizing a speech best suited to topic and audience. 3. Style. Is the way a speaker uses language to express speech ideas. 4. Memory. Is practicing speech until delivered artfully. 5. Delivery. Is verbal and nonverbal behavior when speaking.
Pin Point Onset of Anxiety
1. Pre-preparation. 2. Preparation. 3. Pre-performance. Use anxiety stop-time technique, which allows anxiety for a few minutes and then declare time for confidence. 4. Performance. 5. Post. performance.