What’s your mental picture when you think about public speaking? The President of the United States delivering an inaugural address? A sales representative seeking to persuade clients in a board room? Your minister, priest, or rabbi presenting a sermon at a worship service? Your professor lecturing? A dramatic courtroom scene? Politicians debating before an election? A comedian doing stand-up at a night club?

All of these and more are instances of public speaking. Public speaking takes many forms every day in our country and across the world.

Public Speaking vs. Everyday Conversation

What do we mean by “public speaking?” The most obvious answer is “talking in front of a group of people.” Public speaking is more formal than that. Public speaking is an organized, face-to-face, prepared, intentional (purposeful) attempt to inform, entertain, or persuade a group of people (usually five or more) through words, physical delivery, and (at times) visual or audio aids. In almost all cases, the speaker is the focus of attention for a specific amount of time. There still may be some back-and-forth interaction, such as questions and answers with the audience, but the speaker usually holds the responsibility to direct that interaction.

Although we communicate all the time, public speaking is bigger than everyday conversation. Public speaking is purposeful (to entertain, inform, or persuade your audience). Speeches are highly organized with certain formal elements (introduction and clear main points, for example). They are usually dependent on resources outside of your personal experience (research to support your ideas).

Unlike conversation, speech delivery is “enlarged” or “projected” as well—louder, more fluid, and more energetic, depending on the size and type of room in which you’re speaking—and you’ll be more conscious of the correctness and formality of your language. You might say, “That sucks” in a conversation but are less likely to do so in front of a large audience in certain situations. If you can keep in mind the basic principle that public speaking is formalized communication with an audience designed to achieve mutual understanding for mutual benefit (like a conversation), you’ll be able to relate to your audience on a human and personal level.

There is a cultural practice that achieves this same goal of communication: performance.

What is Performance?

There are multiple meanings of the word performance. The most common use of the word refers to a cultural event that is prepared for an audience. These are live events like theatre, dance, a circus, or a concert. We say, “I’m going to a theatre performance” or a “performance of a concert.” Related to this, performance also means the effort of the artist at these events. For example, we say the “actor performs,” or the “musician performs.”

Another common meaning of performance is achievement, as in how well one performs their job. We use phrases like “the student’s performance” or “that athlete performs well in competition.” This is performance as achievement or ability.

There’s yet another meaning that is interesting because it has a negative connotation: performance as something fake or presentational. In this sense, performing means a person isn’t authentic, not real, just playing a game, just acting.

Finally—and this is the definition that most applies to public speaking—we use performance to speak of how we present ourselves in the fulfillment of a designated social role. Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” (As You Like It). The idea is that on the stage of life, we are all actors. We should ask, therefore, what role are we playing? The answer is: many, many roles. Over the course of a few days or even just a single day, you play several roles. Starting in the morning, you’re showing yourself as a hard-working student in the classroom; over lunch you behave as a friend; you go to work and fulfill your role as a good employee; your parent call and you play the obedient child as you ask for gas money. As we circulate through these different social situations, we perform distinct roles. Taking it further, you can see that we perform not only social roles, but our very identity. Gender identity is one such performance.

Performance in Everyday Life

How did this broad concept of performance come about? In 1956, the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman published a book called The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. The idea of how we present ourselves—perform ourselves—caught on for sociologists, psychologists, cultural anthropologists, and others who study theatre. Lived experience confirmed what felt like common sense: identity is flexible. How we think of ourselves changes with the situations we move through with other human beings.

There is an extension of this idea that is even more interesting. Namely, how we perform these roles isn’t original. Our performed behaviors are part of previously performed behaviors. Think about the way people behave at sporting events. There are special cheers and gestures, face painting, and chants. You couldn’t know how to perform at a sporting event unless these behaviors had been already performed, right? Put another way: each time a crowd gathers to enjoy the game, they are reenacting previously performed behaviors. Another example of this is a marriage ceremony. Marriage ceremonies rely on previously scripted behaviors. If you had a ceremony that was completely original, it wouldn’t be recognized by attendees as a marriage ceremony at all unless it contained some conventional elements.

If our stream of everyday performances is based on already-existing performances, how did we learn them? Did we study them? Obviously not. We learned them like we learned language: naturally and by example.

Public Speaker is a Social Role

This textbook is called Public Speaking as Performance to highlight the central idea that speaking in public is a social role that we perform upon invitation and under specific circumstances. Like all roles, this performance takes its instructions from previously performed examples.

Public speaking has reliable, repeatable behaviors. You know most of them already. How do speakers walk to the front of a room? How do they stand at a podium? What kinds of hand gestures do speakers typically use? These are common to the practice of public speaking. You’ve witnessed them throughout your life and already have the building blocks for that special type of role-playing we call public speaking.

The Communication Process

Human beings communicate with each other all the time and continually, but we don’t give much thought to exactly how it’s that we successfully get our messages across. How do we understand each other? Are we saying what we mean? How does one person speak to many? How does a speaker know they are being understood?

There are several fields of university research that study how communication works. Linguistics, for example, looks at how human languages function. Communication Studies examines a range of communication styles from small group interpersonal interactions to the communicative force of mass media. Departments of Philosophy, Classics, and Psychology each have their way of talking about the communication process. Artists in both the visual and performing arts also think about how they communicate with their audiences.

The Communication Studies Model

According to research in the field of Communication Studies, human communication aims to share meaning between two or more people. The process is composed of certain required elements:

1. 1. Senders and receivers (people)
   2. Context
   3. Message
   4. Channel
   5. Feedback
   6. Noise
   7. Outcome/result

In public speaking, it’s common to call one person (the speaker) the “sender” and the audience the “receiver.” In the real world, it’s not always as simple as that. Sometimes the speaker initiates the message, but other times the speaker is responding to the audience’s initiation. It’s enough to say that the sender and receiver exchange roles sometimes and both are as necessary as the other to the communication process.

Human communication takes place within a context, meaning the circumstances in which a speech happens. Context can have many levels, with several going on at the same time in any communication act.

• Historical, or what has gone on between the sender(s) and receiver(s) before the speech. The historical elements can be positive or negative, recent, or further back in time.
• Cultural, which sometimes refers to the country where someone was born and raised but can also include ethnic, racial, religious, and regional cultures or co-cultures.
• Social, or what kind of relationship the sender(s) and receiver(s) are involved in, such as teacher-student, co-workers, employer-employee, or members of the same civic organization, faith, profession, or community.
• Physical, which involves where the communication is taking place and the attributes of that location. The physical context can have cultural meaning (a famous shrine or monument) that influences the form and purpose of the communication, or attributes that influence audience attention (temperature, seating arrangements, or external noise).

Each one of these aspects of context bears upon how we behave as a communicator and specifically a public speaker.

Third, human communication of any kind involves a message. That message may be informal and spontaneous, such as small talk with a seatmate on a plane, conversing for no other reason than to have someone to talk to and be pleasant. On the other hand, it might be very formal, intentional, and planned, such as a commencement address.

Fourth, public speaking, like all communication, requires a channel. Channel is how the message gets from sender to receiver. In interpersonal human communication, we see each other and hear each other, in the same place and time. In mediated or mass communication, some sort of machine or technology (tool) comes between the people—phone, radio, television, printing press and paper, or computer.

The fifth element of human communication is feedback, which in public speaking is usually nonverbal, such as head movement, facial expressions, laughter, eye contact, posture, and other behaviors that we use to judge audience involvement, understanding, and approval. These types of feedback can be positive (nodding, sitting up, leaning forward, smiling) or less than positive (tapping fingers, fidgeting, lack of eye contact, checking devices).

The sixth element of human communication is noise, which might be considered any disruption that interrupts or interferes in the communication. Some amount of noise is almost always present due to the complexity of human behavior and context. Some categories of noise include:

• something in the room or physical environment keeps them from attending to or understanding a message.
• the receiver(s)’ health affects their understanding of the message, or the sender’s physical state affects her ability to be clear and have good delivery.
• the receiver(s) or sender(s) have stress, anxiety, past experiences, personal concerns, or some other psychological issue that prevents the audience from receiving an intended message.

This brief list of three types of noise isn’t exhaustive, but it’s enough to point out that many things can “go wrong” in a public speaking situation. However, the reason for studying public speaking is to become aware of the potential for these limitations or noise factors, to determine if they could happen during your speech, and take care of them.

The final element of the communication process is outcome or result, which means a change in either the audience or the context. For example, if you ask an audience to consider becoming bone marrow donors, there are certain outcomes. They will either have more information about the subject and feel more informed; they will disagree with you; they will take in the information but not follow through with any action; or they will decide it’s a good idea to become a donor and go through the steps to do so.

Let’s apply this model of communication to the situation of public speaking. It looks like this:

The speaker is a sender within a specific speaking context, who originates and creates a structured message and sends it through the visual or oral channel using symbols and nonverbal means to the receivers who are the members of the audience. They provide (mostly nonverbal) feedback. The speaker and audience may or may not be aware of the types of interference or noise that exist, and the speaker may try to deal with them. As an outcome of public speaking, the audience’s minds, emotions, and/or actions are affected, and possibly the speaker’s as well.

Now that you understand one model of the process of human communication, let’s consider another model. This model comes from the kind of communication that we see in performances such as theatre.

The Theatrical Model of Communication

First, let’s remember the seven elements of communication you have already learned: senders and receivers, context, message, channel, noise, feedback, and outcome. It’s all rather technical, isn’t it? Senders and receivers sound like a cell tower. Message might make you think of sending a text. Channel is a word we use to talk about TV or radio—like a streaming channel. Noise and feedback are associated with sounds that machines make like a bad amplifier or a broken microphone.

Obviously, we’re not communication machines. Is there another model for the process of communication? Theatre performance is an alternative. The elements of theatrical communication are actors and audience, circumstances, story, stage, audience reaction, obstacles, and effect.

Theatrical Model vs. Communication Model

Instead of a metaphor in which speakers and listeners are like a cell tower sending and receiving messages, imagine instead that communication involves actors who tell stories and an audience who listens, hopefully in rapt attention. Even though actors may have something called stage fright, they work through it because they owe it to their audiences to tell the story. As for the audience, these are people who have come willingly to listen. The occasion matters to them. Probably they paid for a ticket. Maybe they dressed up for the occasion. It doesn’t matter how they came together, but it’s that special meeting, essential to the nature of being human, between those who have a story to tell and those who have come to listen.

Now, let’s look at the element of context. Context is akin to something that actors and directors call given circumstances. The given circumstances are everything that we know about the situation in which a story and the storytelling takes place. Every play has a unique set of given circumstances. When creating a theatre production, the entire team analyzes a script to understand all the elements of the world of the play.

Instead of message, think more broadly about the word meaning. When we ask, “what does that word mean?”, we are using one sense of that word. But when we say, “You mean so much to me,” then we are using the word in the sense of important or significant. Why would actors be speaking if they didn’t have something meaningful to say? Why would a playwright write a play if there wasn’t meaning in it? How could a theatre group expect audiences to buy tickets if not with the promise of meaning? Much more than a message, meaning reminds us that speaking and listening matter.

The stage could be thought of as a channel. When we talk about a stage, we usually mean a separate space, one that is different from the space of the audience. Sometimes it’s higher than the audience to make it easier to see, but that isn’t a requirement. Actors use the term taking stage to describe when a person has separated themselves from the group, implying, “Hey, look at me for a few minutes. I have something to say!” Taking stage is a very human and powerful thing to do.

In theatre, actors want to be understood. Actors pay close attention to audience reaction. Often, actors can’t see the audience because of the lights, so they must pay close attention to feedback like laughter and applause, but also to more subtle audience signals like coughing and moving. This feedback might change the energy of the actors, or cause them to speak louder, or to take more pauses for laughter. Actors and public speakers alike are in a dialogue with the audience.

What about those distractions called “noise”? In the theatre, we speak instead about obstacles. Obstacles refer to anything that stands in the way of a person fully communicating with another. Instead of seeing noise as something negative, actors understand that obstacles are the beating heart of drama. Drama wouldn’t exist without people struggling to communicate with each other!

Finally, there is effect. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that the effect of theatre was to allow an audience to experience strong emotions, so that they would be cleansed of these emotions when they emerged again into real life. In public speaking there are different goals, depending on the purpose of the speech. However, they are all connected to these questions: What is the effect we hope to have on our audience?

Both the theatrical model of communication and the communication studies model of communication have their advantages. In the theatrical model, we have people who want to speak and people who want to listen. We have circumstances that tell us who, what, where, why, and why we’re speaking. Theatre tells a story that is meaningful. In the theatre, actors take stage, even when they are frightened, as a way of saying “Look at me. I have something to say.”  They establish a dialogue with the audience by listening to their reaction. Obstacles are inherent to the process of human interaction, but in the end, we hope we have an effect.

To conclude, you may find it productive to consider these lessons taken from what performers know about communication:

• It all begins with the desire to speak and be heard.
• The audience has made an effort to be there. Respect that effort.
• Stories worth telling are stories that are meaningful.
• Consider all the given circumstances.
• Don’t be afraid to take the stage. It’s the only way to tell the story.
• Communication isn’t guaranteed. There will be obstacles.
• Performers are in dialogue with an audience. Communication is a two-way street.
• Whether big or small, you can have your performance make a difference.

Why Practice Public Speaking?

Do you see yourself as a public speaker? And when you do, do you see yourself as confident, prepared, and effective? Or do you see a person who is nervous, unsure of what to say, and feeling as if they are failing to get their message across? You find yourself in this public speaking course and probably have mixed emotions. Public speaking instruction may have been part of your high school experience. Maybe you competed in debates or individual speaking events, or you have acted in plays. These activities can help you in this course, especially in terms of confidence and delivery. On the other hand, it might be that the only public speaking experience you have had felt like a failure and therefore left you embarrassed and wanting to forget it and stay far away from public speaking. This class isn’t something you have been looking forward to, and you may have put it off. Maybe your attitude is, “Let’s just get it over with.” These are understandable emotions because, as you have probably heard or read, polls indicate public speaking is one of the things people fear the most.

Benefits of Practicing Public Speaking

First, public speaking is one of the major communication skills desired by employers. Employers are frequently polled regarding the skills they most want employees to possess, and communication is almost always in the top three (Adams, 2014). Of course, “communication skills” is a broad term and involves several abilities such as team leadership, clear writing in business formats, conflict resolution, interviewing, and listening. However, public speaking is one of those sought-after skills, even in fields where the entry-level workers may not do much formal public speaking. Nurses give training presentations to parents of newborn babies; accountants advocate for new software in their organizations; managers lead team meetings.

If you’re taking this class at the beginning of your college career, you’ll benefit in your future classes from the research, organizational, and presentational skills learned here. First-year college students enter with many expectations of college life and learning that they need to “un-learn,” and one of those is the expectation that they will not have to give oral presentations in classes. However, that is wishful thinking. Different kinds of presentations will be common in your upcoming classes.

Another reason for taking a public speaking course is the harder-to-measure but valuable personal benefits. As an article on the USA Today College website states, a public speaking course can help you be a better, more informed, and critical listener; it can “encourage you to voice your ideas and take advantage of the influence you have;” and it gives you an opportunity to face a major fear you might have in a controlled environment (Massengale, 2014). Finally, the course can attune you to the power of public speaking to change the world. Presentations that lead to changes in laws, policies, leadership, and culture happen every day, all over the world.

Conclusion

To improve your public speaking, it’s useful to be conscious of what you notice about other public speakers. What particular traits make them effective? How can you emulate this? Even with less effective speakers, you can take note of pitfalls you want to avoid in your own speeches. Being able to critique other speeches makes it easier to critique your own performance. As you begin this journey of improving your public speaking, commit to being more aware of how people communicate and what you can learn from it. Below are some reflections that will help you get started.

Something to Think About

• Who are some public speakers you admire? Why? (Don’t name deceased historical figures whom you have not heard personally or face-to-face.)
• What behavior done by public speakers “drives you nuts,” that is, creates “noise” for you in listening to them?
• When this class is over, what specific skills do you want to develop as a communicator?