Public Speaking Chapter Four

Hearing: a sensory process in which sound waves are transmitted to the brain and someone
becomes conscious of sound
Listening: a mental operation involving processing sound waves, interpreting their meaning and
storing their meaning in a memory
Good Listeners:
- Focus attention
- Minimize distractions
- Process messages accurately
- Think critically
Importance of Listening:
- Consequences of faulty listening
- Enables hearers to provide feedback to speakers
- Make their own speeches successful
- Evaluate and respond to the message
- Determine if the speaker is ethical
Difficulties of Listening:
- Listener distractions
o Listening does not fully engage the brain
o Brain trails off causing the audience to fail to listen effectively
o Well delivered speeches are the best defense against distractions
- Limited attention span
o Today’s public messages are shortened causing short attention spans
o Lack of ability to process longer messages
- Jumping to conclusions
o People assume they know what the speaker is going to say causing them not to
listen to the speaker
o They disregard any part that challenges their assumptions
Assimilation: the tendency to regard two similar messages as basically identical, blurring the
distinction between them
- Situational distractions
o Speakers can offset distractions by rephrasing or restating what was said during or
directly prior to the distraction
o Thinking is faster than listening, so people get bored
o Attention span is limited
o Miss speakers point by jumping to conclusions
Steps of Mapping:
- Identify the thesis
o Reconstruct the main ideas and thesis and explain how they fit together
- Identify the main ideas
o Identify core support for the ideas
- Assessing the main ideas
o Determine if the main ideas have been advanced effectively
- Deciding if the main ideas support the thesis
o Judge if there is proper support in the main ideas that ties directly to the thesis
Note Taking:
 - Essential tool for careful listening
- Focus on the thesis and main ideas
- Take notes quietly, on paper instead of on a laptop
- Use key words instead of sentences
- Organize a rough outline
- Abbreviate and use symbols
- Make notes on the notes that you took- explain why you wrote the note down
Critical Listening: listening that enables you to offer both an accurate rendering of the speech
and an interpretation and assessment of it
Critical Thinking: the ability to form and defend your own judgements rather than blindly
accepting or instantly rejecting what you hear or read
Critical Thinkers:
- Are reluctant to accept assertions based on faith
- Distinguish facts from opinions
- Seek to uncover assumptions
- Are open to new ideas
- Apply reason and common sense
- Relate new ideas to what they already know
Facts: statements that can be independently verified by others, they are either true or false
Opinions: judgements that cannot be independently verified and that are not clearly true or false
Assumptions: unstated, taken for granted beliefs in a particular situation
Reflective: considered thoughtful
Critical Thinking Skills:
- Questioning and challenging
- Recognizing differences
- Forming opinions and supporting claims
- Putting ideas into broader context
Critical judgments: judgements that can be articulated and defended by providing the reason
for them
Critical Listeners:
- Assume the speaker knows what they are talking about
- Map, take notes, reflect, and then make judgments
- Carry on internal dialogue with the speaker during the speech
- Ask questions to understand the thesis not to object to it
- Require the speaker to provide support for their claims
- Trust but verify the credibility of the speaker
Rhetorical Situation: a situation in which people’s understanding can be changed through
messages
Key Questions:
- What was the specific rhetorical situation?
- What constraints and opportunities did it pose?
- How well did the speaker respond to the situation?
Expediency standard: evaluation of a speech according to the effects it produced
Artistic standard: evaluation of a speech according to its ethical execution of principles of
public speaking without regard to its actual effects
Evaluating Speeches:
 - Have a constructive attitude to provide a good environment
- Give constructive, but vigorous, evaluation
- An impromptu speech of criticism is a speech written about the quality of the speaker
before you
- Speakers who are deadset against your viewpoint are unlikely to change their view
- Improve your own speaking and put you on guard against what the audience might be
doing during your speech
Rhetorical Criticism: the analytical assessment of messages that are intended to affect other
people