Public speaking Quiz

These terms relate to understanding and adapting to your audience.

Audience-centeredness — Keeping the audience foremost in mind at every step of speech preparation and presentation.
Demographic audience analysis — Examining audience traits such as age, gender, religion, sexual orientation, racial/ethnic background, and group membership.
Situational audience analysis — Analyzing audience traits specific to the speaking situation (size, setting, disposition toward topic/speaker/occasion).
Fixed-alternative questions — Questions offering a fixed choice between two or more alternatives.
Scale questions — Questions requiring responses at fixed intervals along a scale of answers.
Open‑ended questions — Questions allowing respondents to answer however they want.
Egocentrism — The tendency of people to be concerned above all with their own values, beliefs, and well‑being.

These terms relate to persuasive speaking and argument structure.

Persuasion — The process of creating, reinforcing, or changing people’s beliefs or actions.
Question of fact — A question about the truth or falsity of an assertion.
Question of value — A question about the worth, rightness, morality, or desirability of an idea or action.
Question of policy — A question about whether a specific course of action should or should not be taken.
Need — The first basic issue in analyzing a question of policy: is there a problem that requires change?
Plan — The second issue: does the speaker have a plan to solve the problem?
Practicality — The third issue: will the speaker’s plan work?
Burden of proof — The obligation facing a persuasive speaker to prove that a change from current policy is necessary.
Passive agreement — Persuading the audience that a policy is desirable without encouraging them to take action.
Immediate action — Persuading the audience to take action in support of a policy.

These terms relate to how persuasion works and how speakers build credibility.

Credibility — The audience’s perception of whether a speaker is qualified to speak on a given topic.
Initial credibility — Credibility before the speaker begins to speak.
Derived credibility — Credibility produced by everything the speaker says and does during the speech.
Terminal credibility — Credibility at the end of the speech.
Evidence — Supporting materials used to prove or disprove something.
Reasoning — The process of drawing a conclusion based on evidence.
Reasoning from specific instances — Drawing a general conclusion based on specific examples.
Reasoning from principle — Moving from a general principle to a specific conclusion.
Causal reasoning — Establishing a cause‑and‑effect relationship.
Analogical reasoning — Comparing two similar cases to infer that what is true for one is true for the other.
Fallacy — An error in reasoning.
Emotional appeal (pathos) — Appealing to the emotions of the audience.

Reminder that ethos is crediblity and logos is logic