Explain Three Types of Audience Analysis
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Under situational analysis, there some aspects you can look into,
1. Audience Size
For instance, if you are giving your speech in a classroom, your audience is likely to consist of twenty to thirty listeners. This audience size gives you the latitude to be relatively informal within the bounds of good judgment. It isn’t too difficult to let each audience member feel as though you’re speaking to him or her.
Differently, if you have larger audiences, it’s more difficult to reach out to each listener, and your speech will tend to be more formal, staying more strictly within its careful outline. However, you still can engage with the audience by preparing visual or audio material that reaches the people sitting at the back of the room to make sure no one is left behind.
2. Occasion
Some of the most successful speeches benefit from situational analysis to identify audience concerns related to the occasion. Awards ceremonies, conventions and conferences, holidays, and other celebrations are some of the examples under this type of analysis. However, there are also less joyful reasons for a speech, such as funerals, disasters, and the delivery of bad news. As always, there are likely to be mixed reactions. For instance, award ceremonies are good for community and institutional morale, but we wouldn’t be surprised to find at least a little resentment from listeners who feel deserving but were overlooked.
3. Voluntariness of Audience
Consider for a moment when you have been called to answer a question from your lecture. Were you truly happy to listen to the speaker, in all honesty? Some might say “yes,” but usually most would rather be doing something else with their time. This is an important factor to keep in mind when preparing your speech: some people simply do not want to listen to a speech they believe is compulsory.
The situation described above explains what voluntariness of audience is. A voluntary audience is willingly assembled to listen to a given message. As a rule, these audiences are much easier to address because they are interested in hearing the speech. To visualize how this works, reflect upon the last speech, concert, or show you’ve chosen to attend. While the event may or may not have lived up to your overall expectations, the very fact that you freely went to the occasion speaks volumes about your predisposition to listen to—and perhaps even be persuaded by—the information being presented.
Hence, we can conclude that whether or not the audience members chose to be present, you want them to be interested in what you have to say. Almost any audience will be interested in a topic that pertains directly to them.
Now that we have gone through all types of audience analysis, let’s test your understanding on the types of audience.