Audience Analysis Assignment - PERSUASIVE SPEECH
CRITICAL DIMENSIONS OF THE AUDIENCE
Attitude toward topic Does your audience hold positive or negative attitudes toward your topic?
How strong are their held attitudes? Explain briefly.
Attitude toward relevant behaviors and message purpose
What are the audience's current behaviors regarding your topic? Please be specific.
What behaviors are you targeting to change?
Relevant Audience Beliefs
Specify what audience beliefs you assess are open to change.
Ask yourself.what does my audience probably already know about this topic?
What do they think is true? That is not? (beliefs)
What important facts might your audience NOT know?
Relevant Audience Values and their saliency
Identify your audience's values on this topic.
Identify whether you assess held values to be positive or negative, and how strong are your audience's held values?
Relevant Audiences Needs and Motives
Identify WHY your audience may be moved to consider your persuasion (please, be specific).
Explain why audience needs may be met better than the status quo, in other words give good reasons why your audience will be motivated to consider and/or adopt your recommendation(s).
Reference Groups for this audience -- including but not limited to:
Self defined "memberships" - what particular groups does your audience belong to? (for instance: a political party, church, fraternity)
How can you appeal to the unity of the audience as a group? (think: all are students, many are similar age, all live in southern California, most believe family friends and job are most important things in life now)
Assess who you believe to be admired sources. In other words, who are your audience's opinion leaders? (Where does your audience get information about the world they trust to be true?)
Situational variables -- including but not limited to:
Occasions (key dates, holidays, publicly known events, etc.) - what is going on in the outside world currently that affects or may relevantly attach to your topic?
Expectations the audience has concerning source qualifications (your credibility). How are you building credible source research for your topic - information your audience WILL trust?
How do you acknowledge that this is a captive audience, yet encourage them to "stay with you" anyways?
Consider each dimension of the audience included in this assignment prior to writing your persuasive speech.
Remember, audiences have a bias toward sustaining the status quo, unless they accept that a problem indeed exists. Your audience must be motivated to consider your recommendation, and is more likely to do so if you create a common ground between yourself as a credible speaker and your audience. Articulate a problem that genuinely exists in the world today and that relevantly affects your audience's lived experiences. Thoughtful completion of this audience analysis will reveal aspects of your audience that surely will assist you in crafting more sophisticated arguments with your audience's interests in mind.
Vocabulary to become familiar with from your text:
Beliefs
Values
Status quo
Credibility
Initial credibility
Terminal credibility
Opinion leaders