Chapter 11: Audience Analysis
Key Concepts
11-1 Seek information to clarify possible audience attitudes, values, and beliefs.
11-2 Identify what is meaningful to your audience.
Suggested Activities and Exercises
Audience Analysis
Divide the class into groups of three or four. Give each group the name of an organization
All in Favor, Say….
Have students work in small groups for this activity. Half the groups should assume the roles of
Audience Analysis Commercial
Have the students pretend they are an advertising team promoting a health club to a certain
Audience Analysis Project
Using Reasonable Assumptions and Intelligent Inferences to Analyze an Audience
Divide the class into groups of 3–4. For the greatest impact, give each group a different popular
culture magazine (Cosmopolitan, Sunset, People, PC Gamer, Men’s Health, Popular Science,
Have Students Analyze a Speech
Ask the students to identify how the speaker(s) adapts his/her speech to the audience.
Audience Analysis Project
This project asks students to analyze their listeners’ possible reactions to their propositions. Have
Tests
Correct answers are marked with an asterisk. The places in the Compact Handbook where the
information was presented are shown in brackets.
True/False Questions
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Multiple Choice Questions
6. Rishi wants to gather information about his public speaking classmates, as they will
comprise the audience for his persuasive speech. Which of the following methods should
Rishi not employ to analyze his audience?
7. Which of the following questions would yield the least useful information about your
audience?
8. A speaker can anticipate her audience’s expectations by gathering details specific to the
speech situation including asking the following questions:
Essay and Short Answer Questions
9. All demographic characteristics are not equally important for any given speech. Identify
two pertinent demographic questions to ask for each of the following topics: skin cancer,
reality television, politics, environmentalism, education, social networking. [11b Checklist]
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