AUBIH

Prof. Padraic McMickle

Student: Sejjaf Hadzic

Role of audience and responsibility of communicator in delivering message

Table of content

I. Executive summary
II. Communication as process
II.I Learning to communicate
II.II. Different types of communication
II.III. Elements of communication

III. Audience as important part of communication

III.I. Types of audience and delivering information
III.II. Knowing your audience
III.III. Adjusting to needs of audience
III.IV. Analyzing your audience
III.V. Understanding your audience
III.VI. Acting based on research
III.VII. Way of delivering the message
III.VIII. Delivering the message

IV. Conclusion
V. References

Table of graphs

1.1. Different types of communication

1.2. Iceberg theory
1.3. Audience analysis
1.4. Division of audience

I. Executive summary

This

project

is

based

on

different

studies

about

communication.

Communication is process and a skill that is learned through experience. This

means communications can be improved as time is passing. There are
different types of communication that we use every day, from clothing, facial
expressions, nonverbal language, by speaking and many other ways. Every
type of communication has its rules and beside that has it elements. There
are eight components that make communication fulfilled. Elements are
source,

message,

interference.

channel,

receiver,

feedback,

environment,

context,

To make effective communications, there are many different

elements that need to be fulfilled. One of the most important is audience.

Audience can be different and include one or few people, group or big mass.
Speaker needs to evaluate what is the best way to deliver his speech. He
needs to organize himself first to deliver the message properly to be concise
and clear. When speaker does everything obliged to do to deliver effective
speech, than he focuses on the audience. He needs to examine needs, to
meet expectations. Every audience has certain expectations that are needed
to be fulfilled. It is pre-understanding which speaker must bear with. He
needs to analyze his audience to know how to deliver message. After he
analyses he needs to research possible demographics not to make mistake,
offend or distract focus of audience. It is left to speaker to find way to attract
focus and attention of audience. There are many other things that one who
wants to deliver speech has to do, and audience as goal of speech must be
taken in consideration. These are main points in this project and they are
explained throughout this project to explain importance of audience in
communication.

II. Communication as process

II.I. Learning to communicate

Communication is a skill that you can learn. It's like riding a bicycle or
typing. If you're willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of
every part of your life. Bryan Tracy.
According to number of philosophist, man is borned as blank sheet. Beside
instincts, everything he does is essentially learned througout experience.
People start learning how to, among everything else, speaking. It is a process
of learning how to translate thoughts into words and acts. We can tell that
speaking is a skill which is developed throughout his life. No one can speak
fluently at their young age. Word by word, sentence by sentence and a
person can express thoughts clearly. Through education, one can learn how
to express complex words and how to convey a message in more complex
sentences. Reading, writing, speaking, socializing, watching, listening, all
these are affecting persons possibility to express itself. Mozart, Beethoven,
Da Vinci, Michelangelo, van Gogh, Picasso, these were artist, as Petrarch,
Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and even though last five
mentioned were writers they all were communicating. Mozart and Beethoven
through music, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, van Gogh, Picasso, through paintings,
they all were communicating with their audience. Not only words represent
thoughts, signs and different other means can be way of communicating.

II.II. Different types of communication

3
I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing.
Words are the source of misunderstandings. Antoine de Saint-Exupry
Oxford dictionary defines speaking as The action of conveying information
or expressing ones feelings in speech. 1 People tend to think that
communication means speaking, that these words are synonyms, but
essentially, speaking is just one way, one channel of communication. : an act
or instance of transmitting; information transmitted or conveyed; a verbal or written message; a
process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of
symbols, signs, or behavior <the function of pheromones in insect communication>2 As we see,
communication is basically sharing information, through different channels. To deliver message,
or information, signs are used. People often think that communication is speaking, person to
person, or to group of people. That is misleading. Few examples can clear that out.
Communication is for example looking at traffic lights, traffic signs, signs for exit in building.
Imagine, in every shopping centre, person standing by the door and saying to every person whom
passes by him or yelling to the persons who are far from him: Here is exit. People use different
signs to deliver information.

1 http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/speaking
2 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/communication

Picture 1.1. Different types of communication3

II.III. Elements of communication

When it comes to communication, there are several elements, and we will mention in short lines
all of them. The source is the person who imagines, designs and sends the message. 4 Source
imagines information, then transfers it to words or other way of communication then sends it.
Message - stimulus or meaning produced by the source for the receiver or audience. 5 Message
is essentially content that is sent. The channel is the way in which a message or messages travel
3 http://businesscommunicationtony.blogspot.ba/2013/01/different-types-ofcommunication.html
4 Business Communication for succes, Scott McLean, Arizona Western
College. Pub Date: 2010.,
5 Ibid

5
between source and receiver6 Channel is way by which message or content is sent by source.
The receiver receives the message from the source, analyzing and interpreting the message in
ways both intended and unintended by the source. 7 Source is receiving and interpreting the
message that is delivered to him by source through a certain channel. Feedback is composed of
messages the receiver sends back to the source. Verbal or nonverbal, all these feedback signals
allow the source to see how well, how accurately (or how poorly and inaccurately) the message
was received.8 Feedback is basically the reaction of receiver which is evaluated by sender, as
part of two way process. The environment is the atmosphere, physical and psychological, where
you send and receive messages.9 Environment is situation, atmosphere, place where
communication is happening. Depending on environment, conversation is following the path.
The context of the communication interaction involves the setting, scene, and expectations of
the individuals involved.10 Interference is anything that blocks or changes the sources intended
meaning of the message.11 These elements are essential for every communication and in a way,
there is no communication at all if we are missing at least one of these sources. Communication
is all about delivering message or information to the selected receiver. This introduces us the
main idea which will be discussed in this project. Whether we speak with our self, with another
person, with a group or we are engaged in mass communication, we are essentially delivering
speech to certain audience. Communicating involves the translation of your thoughts and ideas
to words. Speaking or writing involves sharing your perspective with others. If you talk to
yourself, the action is a reflection of the communication process, but you play the role of
audience. In your head, you may make sense of your words and their meaning, but when I hear
6 Ibid
7 Ibid
8 Ibid
9 Ibid
10 Ibid
11 Ibid

6
what you said, what you meant may escape me. I might not get it because I dont know you,
your references, your perspectives, your word choices, or your underlying meaning and
motivation for speaking in the first place.12 This points out first thing we need to think of when
delivering speech. We need to be clear and concise, we need to be organized and know what we
want to share with audience, even if that audience is ourselves or one person, and especially
when we are speaking to larger number of people. We need to prepare ourselves to not only
briefly deliver what we want to say, but to know how to share idea.

Picture 1.2. Iceberg theory13

III. Audience as important part of communication

III.I. Types of audience and delivering information

Communication is skill of sharing ideas, information with others. It does not necessarily mean
that one can only speak with another person, group, mass, one can speak with itself. So
12 Ibid
13 https://www.pinterest.com/pin/403846291558715584/

7
communication is essentially targeted, as we know who we speak with and what we want to
share. Regardless of who we speak with, we are sharing our thoughts and ideas. Now, to
communicate something, we need to have someone to communicate it. To have someone to share
information or thoughts with, we need to have either important information, valuable information
or we need to have attention of those we are sharing information with. We need to know how to
draw attention of audience, as they are our goal, understanding of our ideas by audience is why
we communicate. We need to understand our standing to be able to deliver our thoughts
effectively, as at the end, result matters and the result is understanding of our ideas. Audience
doesnt necessarily need to be a large group of people, group of friends at coffee break, family at
lunch, classmates in university, people tend to think that audience means huge group of people
sitting and listening to one person speaking.

III.II. Knowing your audience

Regardless of who people in our audience are, their understanding is crucial to person delivering
message. Our perception and perception of audience is important. Part of this perception is
expectance of the audience. As you are there to share information with them, they expect to hear
something. Expectations affect our perceptions. If the teacher says, I need to see you after class
your perception might involve thoughts like, What have I done? Why me? What does he or she
want? and you may even think back to other times in similar situations. This may contribute to a
negative perception of the meeting, and then you might be surprised to learn the teacher only
wanted to tell you about a scholarship opportunity. The same idea applies to your audience. They
will have certain expectations of you as a speaker. 14 These expectations are known as general
expectations and called conventional expectations.

II.III. Adjusting to needs of audience

14 Ibid

8
Audience is expecting something from you and before you start to speak, audience has opinion.
Now, if it is negative opinion, you have to change it during your speech, if it is positive, you need
to build on that. Speaker and audience absolutely have responsibilities and it is two way street.
Their responsibilities are shared between them. They are supposed to share respect.
Communicator has responsibility to share valuable information and to make speech interesting
and audience has to show by verbal language whether he is doing good job or not, and he has to
apply what is shared to him. Communicator must show that he is certain about what he is sharing,
that he means those things he speaks. He must show them by his behavior that he wants them to
see what he can see. Now it is not always all up to speaker or audience when it comes to
communicating and receiving information. There are different things that stand in that path and
those who stand between these two communication entities. We mentioned before that
communication can have different types of interference, and among those, we have ones we can
deal with, and have those we can not handle or affect. During the day, people collect so many
information that there is no possible way one can process all of them. So every person selects one
over another to cut the amount to sustainable collection of information and more realistic number
of information to process. Now it is responsibility of speaker to make his information important
to audience and that audience finds it relevant to them. This leads to understanding of your
audience.

III.IV. Understanding your audience

People perceive things differently. We choose to select different aspects of a message to focus
our attention based on what interests us, what is familiar to us or what we consider important.
Often, our listening skills could use improvement. Listening and thinking are directly related.
When you are reading, what do you hear? When you are talking with someone, what do you
hear? If the sound of your thoughts or voice is at least one of your answers, then communication
is not occurring.15 Perceiving things differently depends on many different aspects, or attributes
and we will shortly mention them. Physical characteristics influence how we perceive and
respond to information. You may be asked to design a sign that says, Watch your head, which
15 Ibid

9
will be placed next to a six foot six inch overhang that is above floor level. While a few very tall
people will have to worry about hitting their heads on the overhang, most people in the world are
not that tall. Tall and short individuals will perceive this sign differently. Your psychological state
can also influence what you read and listen to, and why you do so. The emergency procedures
binder on the wall next to the first aid kit doesnt mean much to you until a coworker falls and
suffers some bad cuts and bruises. If you were asked to design the binder and its contents, could
you anticipate a psychological state of anxiety that would likely be present when someone needed
the information? If so, then you might use clear bullet lists, concise, declarative sentences, and
diagrams to communicate clearly. Your cultural background plays a significant role in what and
how you perceive your world. You may be from a culture that values community. For example,
the message across the advertisement reads: Stand out from the crowd. Given your cultural
background, it may not be a very effective slogan to get your attention. Our perceptual set
involves our attitudes, beliefs, and values about the world.16

Picture 1.3. Audience analysis17

16 Ibid
17 http://www.slideshare.net/rimurph1/audience-analysis-12984560

10
Regarding this citation it is highly important to know your audience. Time limit for speeches that
include bigger number of audience is short, so there is no time in most of the situations to go
back to explain, or to explain certain parts of information. Therefore preparation and knowing
your audience is essential to deliver good speech. Research is most important part of every
serious business that one can engage with. Preparation is key for success. Preparing should be
first and most important step in delivering good speech. As the business communicators first
responsibility, preparation includes several facets which we will examine: organization, clarity,
and being concise and punctual. Being prepared means that you have selected a topic appropriate
to your audience, gathered enough information to cover the topic well, put your information into
a logical sequence, and considered how best to present it. If your communication is a written one,
you have written an outline and at least one rough draft, read it over to improve your writing and
correct errors, and sought feedback where appropriate. If your communication is oral, you have
practiced several times before your actual performance. 18 It is very beneficial to know
elementary demographics of audience as age, gender, nationality, race, or even groups that are
listening to you.

III.V. Analyzing your audience

Based on that fact that audience is often very diverse you need to find common ground that will
be basis of your speech. As many people tend to focus their thoughts on something they love,
like, prefer, person needs to generally know what they prefer, believe, like. No matter how
audience is diverse, person can deliver good speech by preparing. No matter how big and diverse
audience is, they have to have at least one thing in common, even though, for example, only thing
is that they have in common is they all like ice cream, prepare a speech based on that. If you need
to deliver speech about recent terrorism cases, you have different people in audience, and the
only thing they have in common is that they like ice cream, you start with the ice cream.

18 Business Communication for succes, Scott McLean, Arizona Western College. Pub Date:
2010.,

11

III.VI. Acting based on research

You can base your speech on your experience and compare it with situation you are speaking
about. You can speak about how you like it, how you and other children ate it in your childhood,
how you and other children liked the most to buy a big bowl of ice cream and eat together, than
you did homework together, and that ice cream actually bonded you, so no bully could threat you,
because you were together. Compare that to situation. Ice cream is life, we all need to enjoy it
together, we can enjoy it if we provide it to us, we eat together, we do homework together. We
live together we confront terrorism together, so we can together enjoy life, we can together eat ice
cream. This is simple example that shows how you can at the beginning draw attention of your
audience. Gathering of this information can sometimes be easy if right methods are used.
Audience analysis involves gathering and interpreting information about the recipients of oral,
written or visual communication. There are very simple methods for conducting an audience
analysis such as interviewing a small group about its knowledge or attitudes, or using more
involved methods of analyzing demographic studies of relevant segments of the population. You
may also find it useful to look at sociological studies of different age groups or cultural groups
for knowledge. You might also use a questionnaire or rating scale to collect data about basic
demographic information and opinions of your target audience. Of course, this is not an allinclusive list. But it does help you obtain a general understanding of the methods for learning
about your audience. After considering all the known factors, a profile of the intended audience
can be created, allowing you to speak in a manner that is understood by the intended audience.19

19 The Benefits of Understanding Your Audience. Boundless Communications. Boundless, 14

Oct. 2015.

12

Picture 1.4. Division of audience20

These information gathered if properly used, along with organization and clearness and
conciseness can make effective speech. Understanding who makes up your target audience will
allow you to carefully plan your message and adapt what you say to the level of understanding
and background of the listeners.

III.VII. Way of delivering the message

Communicator must be very careful when selecting way to deliver the message. This is also part
of preparation. Credibility is very important in delivering message, as referencing also. Using
20 http://ellamcleod2-as-ms.blogspot.ba/2014/10/audienceclassification.html

13
good references that people will recognize as trustworthy can benefit the speech in many aspects.
No matter how important nonverbal communication is, verbal communication is important.
Choosing words when speaking, speaking in words which audience can understand is logically
important as communication is useless if audience does not understand. In addition to precise
words and clear definitions, contextual clues are important to guide your audience as they read. If
you are speaking to a general audience and choose to use a word in professional jargon that may
be understood by manybut not allof the people in your audience, follow it by a common
reference that clearly relates its essential meaning. With this positive strategy you will be able to
forge relationships with audience members from diverse backgrounds. Internal summaries tell us
what weve heard and forecast what is to come. Its not just the words, but also how people hear
them that counts.21

III.VIII. Delivering the message

Two practical benefits of conducting an audience analysis are (1) to prevent you from saying the
wrong thing such as telling a joke which offends, and (2) to help you speak to your audience in a
language they understand about things of interest to them. 22 These are all things that need to be
taken in care of when delivering the speech. It is not all about information when it comes to
speech, there is more about other aspects, organization, presentation, conciseness, interference,
environment and many other. Not to be confused information is important, but more important is
how you deliver it and to who you deliver it. Audience is very important as it was tried to be
emphasized in this paper. It is important to know your audience and to know how to use
knowledge about your audience. It is important to make possibility for them to identify with
speaker and with the topic, so they dont see speaker as someone who is smarter, but someone
who understands something and wants to share his vision of that subject with them. By learning
and acting by these things mentioned in this paper, one can deliver very good speech and can
21 Business Communication for succes, Scott McLean, Arizona Western
College. Pub Date: 2010.,
22 Ibid

14
keep audience entertained with fulfilling goal of the speech and that is effectively communicate
and deliver message.

IV. Conclusion
People are social beings. They communicate between each other and that is the way they spread
information and idea among each other. No matter how message is communicated, through
words, signs, signals, the most important thing is that people understand each other. To
understand each other people must send clear messages. Messages can be clear if ideas are clear.
Many elements affect clearness of message and one should not engage itself in any type of
communication without preparation to do it. Organizing, analyzing, researching, constructing,
applying researched are just few of many steps in communicating effectively. To effectively
communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use
this understanding as a guide to our communication with others. Tony Robbins

15

V. References
1. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/speaking
2. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/communication
3.Business Communication for succes, Scott McLean, Arizona Western
College. Pub Date: 2010.,
4. The Benefits of Understanding Your Audience. Boundless
Communications. Boundless, 14 Oct. 2015.
5. http://businesscommunicationtony.blogspot.ba/2013/01/different-types-ofcommunication.html
6. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/403846291558715584/
7. http://ellamcleod2-as-ms.blogspot.ba/2014/10/audience-classification.html