CHAPTER 1: WHY PUBLIC SPEAKING MATTERS TODAY

1.1 Public Speaking in the Twenty-First Century

  • Public speaking is the process of designing and delivering a message to an audience.

  • effective public speaking involves understanding audience and speaking goals, choosing elements of speech to engage your audience and delivering it skillfully

  • good public speakers understand that they must plan, organize and revise their material

1.2 Why Is Public Speaking Important?

  • Most speeches can be grouped into three types

    • Informative: primary goal is to share one’s knowledge of a subject with an audience

      • any career field

    • Persuasive: to persuade others to take actions or reinforce/change beliefs

      • studied by the ancient greeks or whatever

      • elected officials, motivational speakers (Les Brown & Brian Tracy)

    • To entertain: happen at special occasional focused on creating ceremony

      • epideictic speaking

      • wedding toasts, presenting and accepting awards, eulogies, after dinner speeches and motivational speeches

      • religious leaders and comedians

    • Benefits of speech courses are:

      • developing critical thinking skills

      • fine-tuning verbal and nonverbal skills

      • overcoming fear of public speaking.

    • Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel – Ralph Waldo Emerson

    • Professional Benefits of Public Speaking

      • influencing the world around you (fracking)

      • developing leadership skills

      • becoming a thought leader (individuals who contribute new ideas to the world of business)

1.3 The Process of Public Speaking

  • getting your message heard depends on three fundamental components: message, skill, and passion.

  • There are different models of public speaking

  • Linear model

    • Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver

    • mirrored how radio and phone communication worked

    • had three main parts, the source (telephone mic), the channel (the actual telephone) and the receiver (the phone’s speaker)

    • some problems with it exist but it has some useful parellels ig

      • “the source is the person who is giving the speech, the channel is the speaker’s use of verbal and nonverbal communication, and the receivers are the audience members listening to the speech. As with a telephone call, a wide range of distractions (noise) can inhibit an audience member from accurately attending to a speaker’s speech. Avoiding or adapting to these types of noise is an important challenge for public speakers”

  • Interactional model

    • Wilbur Schramm

    • encoding (creating a message, adapting it to its receiver, and transmitting it across some source-selected channel) and decoding (“sensing (for example, hearing or seeing) a source’s message, interpreting the source’s message, evaluating the source’s message, and responding to the source’s message (FEEDBACK))

    • presentation aids can make it easier or harder for a listener to understand (unfamiliar vocab, speaking fast or soft, small print)

    • Feedback has three types: direct (Q & A), moderately direct (audience’s nonverbal feedback), and indirect (votes)

  • Transactional model

    • Dean Barnlund

    • meanings are co-created between people is based on a concept called the “field of experience.”

    • impacted by Our education, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, personality, beliefs, actions, attitudes, languages, social status, past experiences, and customs

  • Dialogic Theory of Public Speaking

    • most people thing that giving a speech is just a monologue

    • Ronald Arnett and Pat Arneson

    • three overarching principles

      • dialogue is more natural than monologue

        • even nonverbal counts

        • if you approach public speaking as a dialogue, the listeners will be the

      • meanings are in people not words

        • you and your audience may differ in how you see your speech.

        • dog being cute unless u’ve been attacked

        • using teenage slang when speaking to the audience at a senior center would most likely hurt our ability to convey our meaning clearly.

      • contexts and social situations impact perceived meanings

        • has four dimensions: physical (how the space (size or decor) you’re speaking in impacts how much you can interact with the audience), temporal (how time or order in speech impacts), social-psychological (relationship among participants), and cultural (shared understandings)