Audience adaptation is where one learns about the different values and characteristics of the audience and adapts the speech to reflect that. Audience adaptation is important especially when one is trying to persuade the audience of something, if the speaker does not know anything about his audience he will not be as effective at holding the attention and interest of the audience. Before writing the speech the speaker should take into consideration several aspects, like the location, the occasion, and the time of day that the speech will occur. The location could be in an auditorium, in a classroom, or in a conference room and could be a great indicator of what your audience will be and therefore, the speaker can decide how formal or informal the speech will be. The occasion can have two types of audiences: voluntary or captive audiences. Voluntary audiences will attend because maybe they found the topic interesting, or they like the speaker, but they will generally be more likely to listen to what the speaker has to say. Captive audiences are there because they are required to be there and so they won't be as willing to listen. The time of day is an important factor because the audience will have different distractions right before lunch than if it was a couple of hours after. Before lunch the audience will be hungry and have a lower blood sugar, so their attentiveness will be very low.
Some of the ways that I can use this for my speech next Monday is looking at these different pieces of audience adaptation - it's located in a classroom with a captive audience in the evening - and looking how I can capture, and keep, the interest of my audience.
Your post made me laugh because I hadn't thought about the things that are going to be affecting everyone the night of our speech. We are all at the end of our days, tired, maybe hungry, already had other classes so our brains are saturated, or still recovering from a big weekend. Knowing these things the challenge is not only to incorporate what I know about the audience (our class) but to keep everyone awake and interested! Especially because these are going to be longer speeches. You've given me more to think about as far as audience adaptation goes. I'm going to have to spruce up my speech a lot!
ReplyDeleteYou have some really creative observations! Something I definitely would not have thought of would be the time of day. I usually focus so much on the content of my speech, and that it will fit all the requirements for the assignment, and never think very much about anything else. If we just took one moment to consider something as simple as this, we could save ourselves a lot of time and stress. We would probably get a much better grade, also! Something else I should really consider is how formal the setting is. I tend to make things a lot more formal than they really should be.
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