What are the things you need to consider about your audience?

Experienced speakers use techniques to make them more interesting to listen to and to help them hold the attention of their audience. Try some of the following the next time you give a presentation.

1. Practice, practice, practice

Rehearsal is essential to speaking well. It will help you keep to a time limit and will allow you to try out various techniques in a low-pressure environment. It will also help you to know your material well, which makes it easier to remember and stay on point. Practice standing and speaking so that you get used to delivering a talk before you have to give it to your audience.

2. Speak, don’t read

Don’t simply read your talk, word-for-word, from a paper. This gets pretty boring for listeners. Spoken language is less formal and wordy than written language, so reading makes you sound stiff and will dampen any sense of energy or spontaneity in your performance. Reading from a paper forces you to look down, instead of speaking to the audience. Instead, if you have a ‘script’, turn it into notes that you can talk from, and glance at only occasionally. It’s less important that you capture the text word for word than that you present the main ideas in a natural and relaxed way (this is where rehearsing helps - it not only improves your performance skills, it enables you to better remember what you want to say).

3. Be yourself

Even in a formal speech, allow your personality to come through. When you’re nervous, it’s easy to tense up and become a little awkward or wooden, but make an effort to stay natural. Smile and make eye contact. You will establish better rapport and credibility if you are being yourself, and your audience will listen more if they can see you as genuine, even if it means being a little less technically perfect.

4. Aim for a positive state of mind and a confident attitude

Try to project confidence, even if you don’t feel it. Remind yourself that you can do it, and that the audience want you to succeed. Visualise a positive outcome. Harness your nervous energy and tell yourself that you are excited - that you have interesting, engaging materials to share with the audience. As you walk to the front of the room, carry yourself in a confident manner. Stand straight, look at the group, take a breath, and smile. Concentrate on what you will tell the audience, rather than your degree of nervousness. This will help you forget your nerves and focus on your topic and your listeners, so you’ll be better able to get them engaged in your speech.

5. Use verbal signposting

Giving an indication of what will be coming later in your talk is an effective way of maintaining audience interest. Use transitions to draw your audience a ‘road map’ of your presentation. For example:

“In a moment I’ll provide some interesting examples, but first ...”

“There are four ways of preventing this. Firstly - secondly - thirdly - finally”

You can also link ideas or sections of your presentation to help your audience follow the overall structure:

“ As I mentioned earlier, the first method was unsuccessful ...”

6. Use examples, illustrations and humour

Use examples or verbal illustrations to create interest. Choose them to suit your audience. An example that comes within their experience of the audience can create interest, a humorous remark can ‘break the ice’ and establish rapport, especially early on.

7. Ask questions and invite participation

Asking questions of your audience throughout your talk helps hold their attention and interest. It also develops a connection between you and the group. Asking questions means you are inviting them to participate and drawing them in to a mutual thinking process. For example:

“Who can estimate the number of individuals left permanently injured by road accidents?”

“Can anyone suggest some alternative uses for plastic bubble wrap?”

“Someone’s home is broken into every seven minutes. Can you believe it?”

You can also speak directly to individual audience members, if appropriate. For example:

“I take it from your reaction that you’ve read something similar, Sarah . . .”

8. Be aware of eye contact and body language

Make eye contact with the audience to help establish a connection. Glance at the faces of group members and don’t be afraid to meet people’s eyes, but don’t stare - use the 3-second method. Look straight into the eyes of an audience member for 3 seconds at a time. Aim for direct eye contact with a number of people, and every now and then glance at the whole group while speaking. Eye contact not only establishes a bond, it can help you register your progress. Faces can indicate interest, confusion and boredom, so you can gauge reactions to what is being said.

Body language is also important. Standing, walking or moving about with appropriate hand gesture or facial expression is far preferable to sitting down or standing still with head down and reading from a paper. Use audio-visual aids or props for enhancement if appropriate and necessary.

9. Learn from the Pros

A great way to learn what good speakers do is to watch them give speeches, note what works and what doesn’t, and adopt these examples into your own style. Note which lecturers are particularly interesting - attend class and watch what they do. Watch some TED Talks online. They tend to be high-quality presentations and provide some great examples.

10. Be aware of technique

Pace

Speaking to an audience requires a pace slower than normal conversation. Nervous speakers tend to speed up, so avoid this. Try varying your pace to create different effects. Try: slow measured speech for a point which is serious or needs emphasising speeding up a little to lend excitement or urgency

Pitch

Aim for a comfortable, medium pitch. High-pitched voices can sound harsh, and a high pitch is often due to shallow breathing and nervousness. Deep, steady breathing and a deliberate attempt to lower the pitch will help reduce nerves. Variations in pitch can be effective. For example, pitch could be raised to add emphasis to a question. However, use with care; too frequent use of high pitch can irritate an audience.

Tone

Tone is the vocal quality which expresses feeling. It can lend warmth and sincerity to your voice or reveal how strongly you feel about a topic. This can evoke a similar response from the audience. In academic presentations, a harshly critical or judgemental tone should be avoided.

Volume

Your voice should be loud enough for the listeners in the back rows to hear comfortably. You can also vary volume to make your talk more lively, but avoid shouting.

Pausing

Inexperienced speakers are often afraid to pause; they see pausing as a failure in fluency, but experienced speakers use pauses to good effect. Pausing can focus attention on what has been said or what is about to be said, can also allow the audience to digest information, or can be used to prepare them for a change in ideas.

* Adapted from: Pitman, 1988, Business Communication.

See also: Know Your Medium

One of the most important aspects of writing effectively is to know who will be reading your text: that is, your intended or likely audience.  Sometimes this is obvious: for example, if you are writing a letter or an email. However, at other times—for example, when writing reports, blogs or marketing copy—it may be less clear.

This page discusses how you can gather information to understand more about your intended audience. It goes on to explore how this affects both the content of your writing (what you say) and the style (how you say it), and why this matters.

Identifying Your Audience

The first question to ask is “Who am I writing this for?”. This is your intended audience.

In other words, you need to know who you are aiming to reach with your writing. This might be an individual, in the case of a letter or email. However, with a blog, marketing copy, or report, it might be one or more groups. Try to identify all the groups that you want to attract with your copy, in as much detail as possible.

You may find it helpful to read our page on Customer Segmentation to understand more about separating your audience into groups.

You also need to be aware of your secondary audience.

This is people who might come across your writing (especially if it is published in print or on the internet).

Even when writing to an individual, your words may be copied and pasted into another format or passed to another audience. You cannot necessarily tailor your writing to fit this audience—but it is wiser to be mindful of them than to ignore them completely.

Why consider your secondary audience?

You may wonder why you should be mindful of an unintended audience.

The answer is simple: both internet and print publications cast a long shadow.

Writing something that could upset or offend people, however inadvertently, may come back to bite you later. Even a private email may be published under Freedom of Information legislation.

If you bear in mind that anything you write may end up public and/or published, you are unlikely to go far wrong.

Understanding Your Audience

Your next step is to find out more about your audience.

In particular, you want to know why they might find your writing useful and/or interesting. What are they looking for from you? Do they want information or entertainment, for example?

The more you know about them, and the more you understand their needs, the easier it will be to meet those needs. In business, this means that they are more likely to become or remain your customers.

You may find it helpful to read our page about Gathering Information for Competitive Intelligence to find out more about how to find information about your audience.

The questions for which you need answers are:

• Why is this audience reading this document or text?

• What are the main concerns and problems that they wish to solve?

In your writing, you are generally aiming to show your audience how to solve those problems (possibly through your products or services, but without any hard selling). Remember that a problem may be as simple as ‘I have no information about topic x’.

The real importance of knowing your audience is that you can adapt your writing to suit those people. This has two key elements:

• Being able to address their main concerns through the content that you include; and

• Writing in an appropriate style.

For example, an annual report written on behalf of a corporate organisation must address the concerns of stakeholders and potential stakeholders. It may therefore need to include information about financial issues, and also corporate social responsibility. However, you can assume that these readers have some background knowledge about the organisation. You will therefore not need to explain every last detail of the organisation, or the roles of each member of staff. Finally, you do not know these readers, and they do not have a close personal relationship with the organisation that is publishing the report. The report will therefore need to be written in a fairly formal style.

However, advertising or marketing copy written about a product or service will be very different. There, you are speaking directly to potential customers or groups of customers. You want to build a strong relationship with them, to make them feel closer to your product or service. You will therefore write in a fairly informal style. However, you will probably use different content and even a slightly different style for different marketing media (and for more about this, see our page on Understanding Marketing Mediums).

Similarly, if you know your readers are specialists in a particular area, you will be writing in a different style, and using different language, from an article written on the same topic for the general public.

Finding Your Voice

Knowing your audience will help you to decide on the “voice” to use.

The writer's voice is a literary term used to describe the individual writing style of an author. It also includes whether the language and style is formal or informal (relaxed). Letters or emails to personal friends may be written in a very informal style since there is already a degree or familiarity between the writer (you) and the audience (your friend).

Marketers often use a similar style in writing marketing copy, because this makes their company seem more friendly and human. This builds a relationship with potential customers.

However, a more formal style may be expected when writing to an unknown peer in another organisation, or to more senior managers (you may find our page Business Writing Tips helpful here).

Other considerations include:

• The level of detail required

  If you are writing to very busy people who perhaps receive hundreds of similar communications, then you should adopt a brief and succinct written style that conveys the key messages quickly and clearly. However, if you know that you are writing to people who want or need detailed content, then provide it. If you are not sure how much detail is required, then it is always best to ask first.

• Whether to include visual information

  It is helpful to include graphs, charts, diagrams or illustrations if this helps to convey the key messages more succinctly than elaborate and convoluted text.

• Any formal constraints such as word counts

  Sometimes you will be faced with formal constraints such as maximum word counts or lengths. For example, executive summaries are often no more than one page in length. You may also be expected to break up the page into chunks, using headings. There is more about this in our page on Know Your Medium.

The Bottom Line

Understanding your audience is crucial to effective writing.

Before you start writing you should always identify your intended audience and try to understand their needs. You can then consider how to tailor both your content and your writing style to suit. However, it is also worth being aware of how your writing might come across to others—and make sure that you are unlikely to offend anyone.