Know Your Audience When Preparing a Speech
One of the most overlooked things I can see when someone is giving a speech is who their audience is.
A great example of this is for a class I took in organization behavior, or the study of human behavior within an organization or business (business sociology/psychology). An engineering student who is really smart in engineering was giving a presentation to our business class about an engineering meeting he sat in on. The class was tired, it was the last speech of the evening after about at least 10 more speeches before this one. The student started talking about the meeting and the assignment was to be an overview of the people at the meeting and their interaction, the length was supposed to be 10 minutes or less. 25 minutes later, my teacher finally cuts the other student off mid sentence to stop.
What was his problem? Lack of knowledge about his audience.
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By that point the speaker should have known that the speech was running way longer than it should have, and people were literally falling asleep.
He should have known that his audience he was speaking to was a business audience, not engineering audience (especially because he was in our class, it was a business class).
He didn’t follow the given format for the speech. The audience was expecting one thing and got a completely different thing (in a bad way, this time). The speaker literally talked dryly about meeting notes from a meeting no one had interest about, that wasn’t the assignment.
The point of this story isn’t to make fun of this student for his speech, but instead to learn from it. If you are aware of your audiences mood, energy level, and knowledge on the subject, you will give a much better speech. You must also know your audiences interest, if they could care less about an engineering meeting you had and you talk 15 minutes longer than you should and no one cared in the first 10 minutes, then they definitely aren’t going to care in the last 15 minutes after you made them stay longer in a 3 hour class.
Learn from his mistake, if you are the last speaker, give a shorter, energetic, more entertaining speech, and practice learning your audiences mood and changing your speech in the middle of it to accommodate if need be.
Photo Credit: @boetter
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