Page 153 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

120 Part 2 Between Audience and Speaker

Listening to Appreciate and Enjoy

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Appreciative listening involves receiving enjoyment from others. This
appreciative listening
could include listening to music, drama, poetry, or a speech to entertain. Though
Listening that involves
it might appear that such listening “just comes naturally,” the fact is that you
obtaining sensory stimu-
can enhance your pleasure by expanding your listening experiences, improving
lation or enjoyment from
others. your understanding of what you are listening to, and developing your powers of
concentration. Music appreciation classes, for example, help students learn what
to listen for in different kinds of music.
This is also true of your speech class. Learning about the various types, styles,
and structures of speeches should help you appreciate what a rarity a good speech
is. Learning how important it is to construct and share a good speech, moreover,
should reinforce your appreciation and give you a more fi nely tuned ear. Here
are some skills that will help you improve your appreciative listening. 16

Tips and Tactics
Improving Appreciative Listening

• Use opportunities to gain experience with appreciative listening. Listening appre-
ciatively, as with all forms of listening, requires experience with different
situations.
• Be willing to listen appreciatively to a variety of writers, speakers, composers, and so
on. Even if you’ve developed preconceptions about a particular composer or
type of music, for example, be willing to listen with an open mind. You may
not appreciate Beethoven, and someone else may not appreciate the Deftones.
Chances are that with a proper frame of mind you can learn what it is that
makes them both appealing to large numbers of people.
• Develop the ability to concentrate while listening appreciatively. Many forms of
appreciative listening depend on not letting your mind wander. Of course,
the greater your experience with a variety of situations that involve listening,
the more ability you will have to concentrate on the important aspects of the
experience.

Empathic Listening

Empathy involves: (1) the attempt to understand why others think and feel as they
do and (2) using this understanding as a foundation for interpreting their commu-
nication behavior. Empathic listening involves focusing on both the content
empathic listening
and relational components of the speech transaction we introduced in Chapter 1.
Listening for the purpose
of understanding and The empathic listener tries to use both the content and delivery of a speech to
relating to the origins of a better understand the speaker’s reasons for sharing information or attempting to
speaker’s thoughts and persuade audience members.
feelings. Empathic listening requires that listeners overcome the obstacles previously
discussed. Genuinely empathic listening also demands more than superfi cial in-
formation about a speaker’s background. Thus, either the listener or the speaker
must fi nd a way to share appropriate details about the speaker’s cultural, demo-
graphic, and individual experience. Paying attention and listening to what your
classmates say in class and during their speeches is a good start in this respect.