We have already talked a great deal about knowing your audience. It is basic good manners for any speech, and it is essential if you want to sway them. You should be able to answer correctly all of these questions about your audience although as we shall see later on you should actually avoid using some of the answers:
1. Who would they accept as a hero and an authority – someone you could cite as being on your side?
2. Who would represent a villain or a clown to them – someone you could associate with the other side?
3. What kind of everyday analogy would they accept as logical and per- suasive? What cultural, scientific, general knowledge could you cite in your support and expect them to understand?
No one likes a guest who domineers, or rants, or shouts.
4. What is the ground from which they draw their goals, their facts and their logic, where do arguments have to be located to make sense to them? Let me give an extreme example. You are speaking to a group of Christian fundamentalists in defence of the right to choose an abortion. I would not recommend you to accept such an engagement, but you have done. If you want to engage with this audience at all, let alone sway them, you must begin your reasoning at the same place as theirs. You cannot start from the rights of women, or the dangers of suffering and crime from making abortions unlawful, or the legal and constitu- tional guarantees which a ban on abortion would violate. With that par- ticular audience the Bible is the source of all truth so you begin your arguments from the Bible, and what is more, the same translation as they use. (Hint: if you are in this situation, try starting from Matthew 22:21 and then construct the argument that the laws of God should not be enforced through the laws of man.)
5. Finally, and invariably, what benefit will your audience obtain from agreeing with you and doing what you want? You must be able to com- plete the sentence Vote for Me (or Buy my Product or Give me your Money or Sign the Petition) and . . . What follows ‘and’ must be some- thing important to your audience.
I repeat, you must answer all the questions before you construct your appeal to the audience. At best the exercise will unlock your imagination and produce unexpected connections between what your audience wants and believes in and what you are offering them. (It will also give your audi- ence the ammunition they need to sway other people who could not get to the meeting.) At worst, it will stop you losing your audience in the first minute.
Not long ago, I was a speaker at a meeting about the euro in an English country town. The previous speaker was a scholarly lord. He spoke for 15 minutes on why Shakespeare would have been against the euro. It was fas- cinating (although it was also a fine example of Irrelevant authority – see below) but it was lost on his audience. The earl gave himself no chance of swaying anybody in the room. He gave no one in the room any ammunition for swaying anybody who had not come to the meeting. He became purely an entertainer.
The exercise I have just described makes some speakers unhappy. They think that it represents ‘dumbing down’ or worse, dishonesty. In the Intro- duction, I said strongly: be true to yourself, and don’t pretend to be part of the same group as your audience if you are not. But is that not exactly what the exercise will make you do?
I think not. First of all, I do not think it represents ‘dumbing down’ to cut out references which an audience will not understand in favour of those which they will. Dumbing down to me means artificially simplifying a sub- ject and translating it spuriously into the world of mass culture. I once heard a history teacher tell his teenage students that Queen Elizabeth I was ‘quite a babe’. It left them cold (teenagers do not like people who conde- scend and besides, ‘babe’ was already out of date as slang). But when he told them that she was ‘broke’, he got them interested. The class discussed the way she saved and borrowed money and stayed in her friends’ houses without paying for her share of the food and expenses, and how these things compared with the way teenagers behaved. ‘Babe’ was fake and dumbing-down; ‘broke’ was honest and vivid.
Nor is the exercise meant to make you abandon your values or to conceal them. It is simply meant to make you understand your audience’s values, so that you can choose a pathway for a logical journey. You may not agree with that pathway, but you can show that by making the right logical jour- ney using that pathway you and they will get to your desired conclusion. Having got there together, you might then be able to show your audience how much easier the journey would have been if you had used another pathway.
That process is not intellectual treachery, but engagement with your audi- ence. If you are not willing to find a common starting point with your audi- ence, you might just as well shout at them ‘Everything you believe in is stupid and it is time you saw things my way. Get real, you dummies!’