• If you know who your audience will be prior to speaking, try performing a demographic analysis. You may want to find out data, such as age, group affiliation, sex, socio-economic status, marital status, etc. Once you have done that, see if any of that information can impact any aspects of your speech. If it does, then determine how and why it impacts your speech. You have been assigned a speech on buying clothing for the upcoming school year. Your audience consists of multicultural, many different socio-economic situations, visiting student groups from India and China. How will you adapt? What topics will you avoid? Why?
• As you know, a person’s values are the most difficult for any speaker to change. You can perform a values survey to determine how difficult it will be to change the minds of your audience. Every persuasive speech addresses some value or values. Take a position, such as “consuming hose meat as an alternative to beef,” and ask potential audience members how they feel about eating horse meat—why and why not. By conducting a hypothetical survey, you begin to understand how to create an effective survey and why it is so important to the speaker to conduct.
• (2016) Exploring Public Speaking. Barbara G. Tucker and Kristin M. Barton. University System of Georgia. Chapter 2.
https://oer.galileo.usg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=communication-textbooks
• (2016) Stand up, Speak out. The Practice and Ethics of Public Speaking. University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing. Chapter 5.
https://open.lib.umn.edu/publicspeaking/