The speaker often has a role to play in ensuring that a persuasive message is successful. This happens when the speaker fails to analyze his or her audience efficiently. It is important that one selects clearly the purpose of the persuasive message. Secondly, the purpose needs to be realistic. It is of great importance that persuasive messages are adapted well to the audiences that it targets. It is importance to know the character of the audience and how to gather information about them (Benoit 1).
The speaker should know the audience characteristics he or she is going to talk to. Four elements that the speaker should identify are size, homogeneity, history, and demeanor. One also needs to know about the audience in the basis of how much content they know about the topic, their interest in the topic, and the attitude they have towards the topic and speaker. This is because audiences differ from each other so much and should always be an assumption made by the speaker (Benoit 2-3).
The speaker needs to gather information about their audience since it makes it easier to adapt the message and be persuasive and accomplish the intended purpose. The two main types of information that are important and should be collected are demographic information, and opinions of the audiences. There are methods that can be used in collecting all the required information about the audience. They include observation, summary data, and interaction. After collection of the data, the next step that the speaker is required to undertake is using of the analysis of the audience in persuasion. Decisions need to be made about the analysis and adapt it to the persuasive speech (Benoit 4).
Presentation
It is important that the speaker knows the purpose of the message. The message should not be vague but should be more specific to help in decisions of the type of information to include in the message. Selecting a realistic purpose will help in delivering the right message to the right people. For example, you cannot adopt a purpose to persuade young republican to vote, yet they are not of voting age (Benoit 1).
When evaluating the characteristics of the audience, the size of the audience must be put into consideration. The smaller the audience the more intimate the speaker can get with them and when the audience is large then the more effective the message will be. On the history of the audience, the speaker needs to know the past of the audience he will be speaking to. The audience varies in demographic characteristics thus it is important to know their homogeneity. The audience’s demeanor to the speaker reveals the presence of negative attitudes (Benoit 2-3).
Knowing the audience on the basis of how much they know about the topic is important. Some audience seems to know a lot while others know nothing at all about the topic. It is also important that the speaker knows if the audience he will speak to is interested in the topic of discussion. If they are not interested, then the speaker has to convince them why it is good. There is a need to also create a positive attitude in the audience and towards the topic and speaker (Benoit 4).
Collecting demographic information helps in putting the audience into social groups. It helps the speaker know about the speaker’s knowledge on the topic. Audience opinions are collected through questionnaires and interacting with them and it helps the speaker know the audience he is dealing with (Benoit 4).
Works Cited
Benoit, William. Persuasive Messages: the Process of Influence. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Print.
