Public Speaking

A constructive listener is supportive yet listens carefully and critically. Such listeners seek the value in all messages. Because the fate of a message depends on how listeners respond to it, the audience must be at the center of your thinking as you plan, prepare, and present your speeches. What needs or problems concern them? What subjects interest them? What biases could distort their reception of message? Such questions are crucial to the selection of your topic and to the way you frame your message. Moreover, you should be sensitive to the fact that your words could affect the lives of listeners and even their perception of themselves. Listeners do not come to a speech with a blank slate. Their minds are filled with past experiences, information or misinformation about a topic or speaker, attitudes and values, aspirations and fears. All of these factors form the frame of reference that a listener brings to a speech. The better you understand these audience factors, the more...

The response to a speech is what happens during and as a result of the speech. Of course you hope that your speeches are well received and that they will affect the lives of your listeners favorably. But whether they achieve that result depends a great deal on what happens during the speech. One of the things that make public speaking dynamic is its interactive quality. While you are speaking, listeners are responding. As they respond, so should you. This makes a speech an interaction in which listeners and speakers constantly adjust to each other. These on-the-spot adjustments lend an unpredictable quality to public speaking that can make it an interesting and exciting form of communication. Note the adjustment that one of our speakers made during a speech on the dangers of global warming; Some of you are frowning, and I can hardly blame you. This is really hard to believe. But let me quote to you the words of Time magazine in a recent survey of all these scientific disc...

Successful speeches obviously have impact. As a result of them, listeners learn, decide to change their minds or to take action, or join in celebrating the meaning of exemplary lives. Moreover, if we could see the communication process at work in a speech, we might also see the identities of speakers and listeners coming into or out of focus of communication or show those same people growing larger or smaller. These effects would all represent the consequences of public speaking, especially the ethical impact of public speaking as transactional and transformational communication. Transactional communication suggests that successful communication goes beyond personal achievement and the sharing of vital information, ideas, and advice. It implies the sharing and sharing of sieves. In the introduction to Bridges Nor Walls, John Stewart, an interpersonal communication scholar, notes: “Every time persons communicate, they are continually offering definitions of themselve...