Toastmasters · Carmel Valley · San Diego 92130
HiFi-U · Writing For Speaking
Writing For Speaking #5 · Your Audience Creates Context
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Writing For Speaking #5 · Your Audience Creates Context

Listen or Read | Toastmasters · San Diego · Carmel Valley · 92130

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[0:03] From Hi-Fi Speakers, I am Mark Whitney with today's Educational Minute. Listen up. When selecting a topic, eventually you've got to narrow your selection. That is great when you're in that position, right? Because it means you've been doing a lot of thinking, a lot of note-taking, you've been sending yourself a lot of little texts, little emails, filling out index cards. I love index cards. I'm telling you right now, I'm not even making this up. In my studio right now, I have about 5,000 index cards in packets of 100. I order them by the wheelbarrow. I write them down, and I throw them in a stack. Again, I throw it in a stack, and then I take the stack, and I look at it. I go, yeah, that's what I should be doing. You've got to narrow your selection down. You've got to pick something, and you can use the following criteria to narrow down your selection. The audience helps create context. You're not going to do things the same way to a late night audience at a comedy club as you're going to do at a noontime Toastmaster meeting in a corporate setting. So before you speak, you don't need to think about your audience. The way you define the word appropriate is going to change. That's going to help you narrow your selection.

[1:16] You can only do certain things in certain venues. To maximize your success, match the content and direction of your speech to the needs of those who will be attending. It's not about your needs. It really is. It really is. See, it's art. It really is about your needs. But the art is when the audience feels it's all about them.

[1:39] So you got to think about that audience. You need the audience. They need you. It's a conversation. You got it narrowed down. The intersection really of your needs and the audience's needs is what it's all about because you need to be talking about what you're thinking about and you got to find a way to connect that to the universe.

[2:02] How many people are going to be there? How old are they? Will they already be familiar with the subject matter? If so, find some little granular thing that you've thought through at a level, at a Seinfeld-like level, right? Seinfeld will do seven minutes about raisins. He'll spend 200 hours preparing seven minutes on raisins before he points a camera at it. Does your audience have similar education, interests, backgrounds, and experiences? I don't know. If you're doing a subject matter keynote because you're a data scientist, the audience is going to be data scientists. You're going to talk about your specialized knowledge differently to that audience than you would when it's Bring Mom To Work Day in the third grade.

[2:53] Know your audience. That's today's message. Today's educational minute. We're here Monday through Friday at four o'clock Pacific time. Download the award-winning Substack App and subscribe. We are at myhifi.club.

[3:08] Music.

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