Page 195 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

• Traditions
• Time
• Resources

Check Your Understanding: Exercises and Activities
1. Given the topic of alcohol abuse, how might you develop your speech presen-
tation differently if your audience were made up of (a) high school students,
(b) students your own age, (c) bar and tavern owners in your community, or
(d) recovering alcoholics? In a short paper, explain how your approach and
purpose would differ in each case.

2. Create a model of your belief system, including your core beliefs, authority
beliefs, and representative derived beliefs, on one of the following topics:
gun control, the importance of voting, abortion, civil unions. What does
your belief system say about how susceptible you are to being infl uenced on
the topic selected?
3. Interview a student from another country who is studying at your univer-
sity. What most surprised him or her about American culture? What would
Americans be most surprised to know about his or her culture? Write a short
paper or give a short talk about what you have discovered.

4. Learn as much as you can about the cultural, demographic, and individual
diversity of your classmates. Construct a short questionnaire that will guide
you in preparing for an upcoming speech. After obtaining your instructor’s
approval, write a survey about your chosen topic. You might ask questions
about what your audience already knows about the topic, their attitudes for
or against your position, and their level of interest in the topic. Distribute the
questionnaire to your classmates and collect their responses (anonymously,
of course). Tabulate the results. For example, if your topic is banning the sale
of handguns known as Saturday night specials, you might report that 60 per-
cent of your classmates were familiar with the term, while 40 percent were
not; that 50 percent agreed with a ban, 20 percent opposed one, and the
remainder had no opinion; and that 30 percent felt gun violence was a major
issue, while 70 percent did not. Based on these results, write a short paper on
how you used this information to shape your speech. Also indicate how your
plans for your speech may have changed based on the information from your
survey.

Notes

1. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (New York: Modern Library,
1954), 24.
2. Lloyd Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (1968): 5.
Bitzer further defi nes an exigence as “an imperfection marked by urgency; it
is a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other
than it should be” (6). In this text we prefer to focus on the speaker’s goal,
which, strictly speaking, is to overcome the exigence present in the rhetorical
situation.
162 3. Bitzer, “Rhetorical Situation,” 8.