Page 178 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

Chapter 6 Adapting to Your Audience 145

or may not be similar to you or other members of your audience. This makes it
especially important that you compare your audience with yourself.
Some of the most effective speakers are similar but not too similar to their au-
dience. Reentry students in their 40s can be somewhat intimidated by speaking
to classes of 18- to 22-year-old classmates. Similarly, a 20-year-old asked to speak
to a group of middle-aged people may feel uneasy. In situations where there is a
big difference in age between speaker and audience, points of similarity can be
stressed. For example, older students speaking to a younger audience can dis-
cuss their children, who might be the same age as the rest of the class. Similarly,
younger persons facing an older audience can make reference to parents or grand-
parents in an effort to fi nd a common thread linking them with the audience.

Gender and Biological Sex

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Whether you agree that “men are from Mars and women are from Venus,”
you cannot deny that men and women often have diffi culty communicating with
each other. As our discussion of masculine and feminine cultures illustrates,
gender’s infl uence on how people perceive themselves and others is a subject
receiving considerable attention. As scholars such as Julia Wood point out, gen-
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der is much more than your biological sex. Gender is the blend of social and
cultural characteristics associated with maleness or femaleness in a particular
culture. Individuals learn gender roles—the expectations their cultures have of
them as males or females—in the course of growing up.
As you look out at an audience, you can usually tell who is male and who is
female by such outward signs as dress and hairstyle. But unless you have more
specifi c information, you cannot tell who is gay and who is straight, or who is in
a committed relationship and who is single. Much gender-related information is
probably beyond your knowledge in most public speaking situations.
Some audiences will be predominately one gender or the other, and they may
be the opposite of your own. Thus a male speaker facing a largely male audi-
ence is in a different situation than one facing a largely female or evenly mixed
audience.
One of the fi rst issues you will face is topic selection. For example, one of our
students gave a speech about the dangers of breast enhancement surgery. She
and the female members of the audience obviously had an interest in the topic.
Why should the males care? She made a specifi c effort to include the men in her
audience. She talked in terms of their girlfriends or wives, and made a strong
plea to men to accept their mates as they are. Although this topic obviously had
a greater direct relevance to the women in her audience, she was careful not to
ignore her male audience members.

Ethnicity
Although closely related to culture, ethnicity is not the same thing. For example,
in one of our classes recently, we had both a Japanese exchange student and a
fi fth-generation Japanese American. Both might appear outwardly to share the

same ethnic background, but they identified with very different cultures. An-
thropologists will tell you that all of us can trace our ethnic roots to other places
on the globe. The ethnic origins of many of your classmates may be signifi cant
to their self-concept. These same classmates may be actively involved in main-