The Speaker
The same speech delivered by different speakers can produce quite different reactions
and effects. Your interest in the subject—as made evident through voice,
delivery, and the vividness of your imagery—helps to determine how the audience
will react to the speech. Your ethos affects whether listeners will pay attention
and will regard you as believable. Fortunately, many of the skills that enable
speakers to contribute positively to a rhetorical situation can be learned. Previous
public speaking experience will also affect your comfort level, and the ability
to respond to audience feedback will make you more flexible in any rhetorical
situation.
Speakers have a purpose in mind. The three most general purposes of speeches
are to inform, to persuade, and to entertain.
• Informing provides listeners with new information or ideas.
• Persuading influences listeners’ attitudes and behavior (either to strengthen
existing beliefs or to support new ones).
• Entertaining stimulates a sense of community by celebrating common
bonds among speaker and listeners.
Although these general purposes may seem to be completely separate, they often
coexist in a single speech—as when a speaker aims both to share new information
and also to use that information to influence attitudes and behavior (or to
stimulate a sense of community). For this reason, in Chapter 6 we will classify purposes
in a more detailed way. For now, though, focus on the general purposes and
realize that you must have (1) something about which to inform the audience, (2)
some position you want to persuade them to take, or (3) some subject with which
to entertain them. Therefore any speaker also has one or more specific purposes.
Here are some examples:
GENERAL PURPOSE: Informing
SPECIFIC PURPOSE: Explaining the main steps in the construction of the college library.
GENERAL PURPOSE: Persuading
SPECIFIC PURPOSE: Urging listeners to endorse the president’s economic proposals
and to send supportive e-mails to the president and our elected
officials.
GENERAL PURPOSE: Entertaining
SPECIFIC PURPOSE: “Roasting” the boss on the eve of her retirement.
In each case, the specific purpose is the standard to use in deciding whether the
speaker achieved the goal and responded adequately to the rhetorical situation.
By this standard, good speeches are ones in which the speaker achieved the
purpose; bad speeches are those in which the speaker did not. Yet clearly this
standard
is not enough. We do not want to regard as good a speech that misleads