Consider the Culturally Diverse Backgrounds of Your Audience You need not give speeches in foreign countries to recognize the importance of adapting to different cultural expectations of individual audience members. People in the United States are highly diverse in terms of their culture, age, ethnicity, and religious tradition. Consider the various cultural backgrounds of your classmates. How many different cultural and ethnic traditions do they represent? Several years ago, the typical college student was likely to be a recent high-school graduate be- tween the ages of 18 and 21. Today your classmates probably reflect a much wider range of ages, backgrounds, and experiences. You will want to adjust not only your delivery style but also your topic, pattern of organization, and the examples you use, according to who your audience members are and what subject or subjects they are interested in.

Different cultures have radically different expectations about public speaking. In Russia, for example, speakers have a “no frills” approach that emphasizes content over delivery. A presentation that seems perfectly sensible and acceptable to a U.S. busi- nessperson who is accustomed to straightforward, problem-oriented logic may seem shockingly rude to a Chinese businessperson who expects more circuitous, less overtly purposeful rhetoric. And some African American audiences “come to partic- ipate in a speech event,”60 expecting the speaker to generate audience response

CONSIDER THE

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20 CHAPTER 1 Speaking with Confidence

through rhythmic “call response formulas”61 from the African American oral tradi- tion. When one of this book’s authors taught public speaking for several semesters in the Bahamas, he shocked students by suggesting that they should achieve a con- versational, informal delivery style. Many Bahamian audiences, he quickly discov- ered, expect formal oratory from their speakers, very much as U.S. audiences in the nineteenth century preferred the grandiloquence of Stephen A. Douglas to the qui- eter, homespun style of Abraham Lincoln. So your author had to embellish his own style when he taught the Bahamian class.