Tailor Your Presentation

Tailor Your Presentation to Meet the Needs of the Audience

The three things we will cover:

Analyze your audience

Analyze your situation

Narrow your topic

Analyze Your Audience
Analyze Your Audience to find out who is going to be in the audience. You don’t want to be persuading them to join the Hair Club and they all have a full head of hair. Looking into the ‘demographics and psychological make-up’ of the audience will help us to analyze the audience.

 
  Demographics – Characteristics and traits of the audience; job title, length of employment, gender, age, education, religion, political group, if they have hair or they don’t have hair.  Demographic information will help us to make some pretty good assumptions.  If they are managers and have been in the management position for six years and they have to have an MBA to be a manager – well, they are a very knowledgeable group. 

  Psychological Make-up will help us to analyze the group by finding out their specific knowledge, what they personally want to get out of the presentation, their level of interest, attitude, or opinions.  We can find this material by doing focus group interviews or surveys.  Always feel free to survey our class to find out what they know or don’t know about your topic.

Analyze Your Situation

Analyzing your situation will help to minimize mistakes that could occur in the presentation.
  Know your W's – 

When is the presentation, what equipment is available, why do you need this presentation, how many people will be attending, how long is my presentation …
  Know your classroom situation for each speech

Narrowing Your Topic

Narrow Your Topic to the audience and the situation will help you to reach their needs.  You should narrow your topic before you start to do your research.  If you start to do the research first you will not know what you are truly looking for.  You choose the topic of ‘The Civil War’.  Well, there are about 8 billion pages written about the Civil War but, you only are doing a 6 minute speech.  You cannot fit 8 billion pages into a 6 minute speech. You need to narrow this topic down.  You can choose a particular battle, person or event. 

 

There are three parts to narrowing your topic:
  General Purpose
  Goal Statement
  Message Statement

  General Purpose: This is to get your basic focus.  It is written with only two words: To Inform or To Persuade (infinitive – the word ‘to’ followed by a verb ‘inform or persuade’ for our speeches.  This infinitive is then dropped down to start the Goal Statement.)
 

 Goal Statement:   To inform my audience .... (then narrow the topic) or To persuade my audience ...

            The goal statement will have a reference to the audience.

            The goal statement is where you start to narrow your topic. 

            The goal statement is what you the speech writer will do to the audience.
To inform my audience about cancer - this is too broad
To inform my audience about leukemia
To inform my audience about adulthood leukemia
To inform my audience about three warning signs of adulthood leukemia 
Keep the word 'and' out of your goal statement - keep the goal to one major idea. 

  Message Statement: The one thing you want the audience to remember 24 hours after they hear your speech.  Do not write it like a goal statement.  Write the way they would say it to themselves.  Your main points DO NOT go in the message.  Your main points will support your message in order to have an effective presentation.

Knowing your Goal and Message will help you to stay on track during research and the writing of your speech.

Examples

General Purpose: To Inform

Goal Statement: To inform my audience how the rifle changed during the Civil War.

Message: The rifle changed dramatically during The Civil War

         

     Now, I know what to do my research on. 

General Purpose: To Persuade
Goal Statement:   To Persuade my audience to shop at Von Maur
Message Statement:  You want a great store - go to Von Maur's

General Purpose: To Inform
Goal Statement: To inform my audience about fly fishing
Message:  Fly fishing is an enjoyable past time

Here are two examples to fix:

GP: To inform
GS: To inform my audience of the process of adoption.
MS: To inform audience of adoption process, give overall view of social agencies that service this procedure.

  
GP: To persuade 
GS: To inform my audience to vacation in Ft. Myers Beach, Fl.
MS: Ft. Myers Beach is the best place to vacation if you want to relax and sit back.

Be ready for the next class session: 

Write down 6 different topics that you could speak on in this class.
Identify which ones you would make informative or persuasive.
Save your favorite topic for your final speech.
The Informative Speech, Persuasive Speech, and Final Speech need to be researchable topics.

For the Pick A Topic Speech it is your choice for the General Purpose.  The Pick A Topic can be about anything.  You can make it up.  It can be real.  You can give us your opinion on something.  It does not have to be researchable.  It can be about your dog Skippy.  The only thing being graded in the Pick A Topic speech is your outline, a couple of visuals (which you will learn about in the Be Organized lecture), and you can make the time frame. 

For the Final Speech it is your choice for the General Purpose.

Narrow one of your topics and bring it to session 3 - try to make this your Pick A Topic Speech which you will be delivering on session 6.