History 216

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History 216: History and Anthropology

Question 9

An audience analysis provides the speaker with critical information in planning, writing, and delivering a speech

Audience analysis incorporates understanding the audience and modifying the speech to meet their interests, attitudes, level of understanding and beliefs (Sellnow, 147). It gives the speakers boundless effectiveness because the presenter creates content and delivers in a good manner. Speakers identify and analyze the audience through extensive research, which is often difficult to undertake. They rely mostly on observation and imagination to understand the audience.

Audience analysis evokes deeper efforts than just giving the audience their favorite content. It involves changing the style and content. The speaker needs to consider factors such as demographics of a targeted audience, expectations, attitudes towards content/topic, audience size, setting, and knowledge of the topic. Critical consideration of these factors gives the speaker a position to plan, write and deliver the speech. Importantly, the speaker’s content should be simple, easy to understand and uses simple vocabulary. During the presentation, the speaker’s voice should be clear, succinct and words articulated authoritatively.

Question 7

All nonverbal communication is learned and varies significantly across cultures

Nonverbal communication is a quintessential aspect of effective communication. They aid communications and bring deeper meaning to the spoken words. It also conveys the feelings and aspirations of the speaker (Matsumoto, 7). Non-verbal aspects include body language, gestures, facial expressions, posture, and paralanguage. Non-verbal communications are independently learned and are culturally different. Different cultures have different non-verbal cues. This means the meaning or message conveyed by distinct body languages are different across cultures. For instance, most western cultures consider eye contact as a sign of good gesture. It portrays honesty and confidence. In other cultures such as Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans, eye contact means rudeness and offensive expression. Many cultures have a different interpretation of gestures. In the United States, use of hand gesture to may mean, “come here” however, in other cultures it may be offensive (Zhi-peng, 6)

Works cited

Matsumoto, David. "Culture and nonverbal behavior." Handbook of nonverbal communication (2006): 219-235.

Sellnow, Deanna D, and Deanna D. Sellnow. Confident Public Speaking. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2005. Print

Zhi-peng, R. "Body language in different cultures." US-Chine Foreign Language,(12) 12 (2014): 1029-1033.