Types of Audiences

When presenting a persuasive speech, a speaker can come across a number of types of audiences. The book discusses five different types that are the negative audience, positive audience, divided audience, uninformed audience, and the apathetic audience. We all might hope that we are granted a positive audience, which is an audience that not only knows about your topic but also favors it. A negative audience is one that is informed of your topic but does not favor it. To help present to a negative audience a speaker can work to establish further credibility or choose a more common ground approach. A divided audience is full of listeners that are informed and half are favorable while the other half are unfavorable, to help address this type of audience a speaker can acknowledge the reasonableness of both sides. An uninformed audience is not informed of your topic therefore they do not hold an opinion, and an apathetic audience is informed but just really doesn’t care. To help with an apathetic audience the speaker must really work on gaining the audience’s interest.