The Audience in Rhetoric
Aristotle’s View more presentations from jRhetoric reminds speakers of the importance of speaking with your audience in mind. This lesson is just as important today as it was in the fourth century BC. When presenting, a clever speaker will tailor his words so that they fit his specific audience like a glove. By using personalized approaches and phrases that carry special meaning with certain types of audiences, a rhetorician can craft his speech to create a certain reaction. There are two dimensions to any audience: the factual audience, and the fictional audience. The factual audience is composed of the flesh and blood people in the crowd, while the fictional audience is the audience who the rhetorician imagines and projects through his/her discourse. When making a speech to a group of teenagers entitled, “How to Get Along with Your Mother,” a speaker will need to keep in mind the age and attitude of his audience. By projecting a fun and well-meaning group of kids, the rhetorician can make his audience feel better about themselves and cause them ot pay closer attention. Because of the audience’s young age, a collectively short attention span is to be expected. Well-placed humor can be used to combat this phenomenon. Funny anecdotes allow a speaker to connect with his teen audience by uniting them through similar shared experiences. Current cultural references can further this connection between the speaker and the audience by giving the impression that the speaker is “hip” and understands the audience’s world. A visual aid such as a PowerPoint will also prove useful. The current young generation has grown up with television, movies, and video games; therefore, they are used to having a visual to look at. Giving teenagers something to watch while they listen to a speech will hold their attention more effectively than a speech given without a visual aid. Moving images that reinforce the speaker’s words delight and interest teenagers. This example PowerPoint includes features such as references to familiar fables, mentions of current television shows, and jokes based on widely taught principles. These features function together to create an appealing and stimulating speech which teenagers can easily follow. A speech about the same topic may need to be tailored differently for a different target audience. For example, a speech entitled, “How to Get Along with Your Teenager” given to parents would need to contains different elements of seriousness, humor, and cultural references. It is important to keep in mind who you are speaking to, how the audience is going to be affected by what you say, and how the audience may affect the impact of your speech.
Juxtaposition
Through the comparison two items, the meaning of each individual item can become clearer. For this reason, juxtaposition is a useful tool available to rhetoricians. By mixing visuals with text, the strategies of repetition, symbolization, contextualization, analysis, or irony can be achieved. These five strategies enhance the impact of the rhetorician’s presentation on the audience.
Two sculptures entitled, “The Imperfect Man” and “The Perfect Man” provide a nice example of juxtaposition. In this sculpture example, repetition to used in the style of the words and image. The perfect man’s background is composed of perfect, times new roman, printed quotes. The words and image work in harmony. The perfect man is displayed through the pure, white form of a man and through Plato’s quotes. The imperfect man’s background is composed of words that reflect the sculpture’s bad nature. The words are printed in jarringly bright colors and random fonts. These words are reinforced by the sculpture of the man, which is grotesque and made of bright, unnatural colors. The words and the image in this case are saying the same thing. The imperfect man’s non-biodegradable materials symbolize his lack of harmony with nature. They impress upon the audience the unnatural state that the imperfect man exists in. The two sculptures ironize the situation of humanity through their contrast. The viewer realizes that the imperfect man, who so sharply opposes nature, will never decompose. Meanwhile, the perfect man will quickly dissolve to nothing. The irony of the images lies in the fact that good morals are so much harder to preserve than poor morals.Proper use of juxtaposition creates a new dimension to an ordinary oration. It can be thought provoking or merely work to reinforce the message of the text. By combining the abstractness of words with the concreteness of images, a new level of understanding can be thrust upon the audience.
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