5.1 The Impossibility of Separating Message from Audience

It must be a very strange thing, to give a speech and see half the audience stand up and applaud wildly, while the other half remains seated, scowling in silence. If that has never happened to you, that’s because you’ve never been President of the United States and haven’t delivered a State of the Union speech. Every recent president, however, has seen that sight, and it’s even spatially divided: the people giving the standing ovation are all on one side of the room, and the scowlers are on the other. You may not be aware that when we refer to a politician as “left wing” or “right wing,” we mean that literally: in the Senate chamber in Washington, the Democrats sit on the left side of the room (facing the podium) and the Republicans sit on the right side:

Imagine yourself at the podium. Since each side of the room responds so differently, who do you give your speech to? On a formal level, the answer is “everyone,” but the situation must force you to think about those different sides of the room and who you want your speech to appeal to, and even where to look. Do you only think about the “friendlies,” and make points that you know they will be happy to hear? There may be political risks in tuning out the other half of the audience, but this is one of the coping strategies you could choose. You can even emphasize “wedge issues” that deliberately divide the audience, assuming that the unfriendly audience is a lost cause, and that those inflammatory issues will “mobilize the base” and stir them to action.

Another option is to tailor your speech to the “unfriendlies,” seeing if you can bring them on board with policies you want to advance. In a divided group like the U.S. Senate, this could be risky, since saying something that appeals to the other party might mean alienating members of your own. You might feel confident, however, that your loyalists will stay with you no matter what you say, and that the benefit of picking up a few new supporters is worth it.

You could try the middle-of-the-road approach of saying only things that appeal to everyone in your audience — which might mean that everything you say is an empty platitude and you have no clear message. And if you’re daring, you could use the “dog whistle” approach, sending messages that will be heard one way by one audience segment, and a different way by other members of the audience.^[1]

No matter what you try, however, one thing is impossible: to think about your speech without also thinking about your audience.

Even if you never become President of the United States, it’s worth keeping in mind the principle that you can’t think about what to say without also considering who you are saying it to. You might be a podcaster, a doctor interacting with patients, or a kindergarten teacher; you might be sending a resume to a company you’d really like to work for or want your boyfriend’s mother to like you — in every case, the lesson is the same: the key to effective communication is to know your audience.

Over 2,000 years ago, Chinese philosopher Han Fei Tzu observed that

The difficult thing about persuading others is not that one lacks the knowledge needed to state their case. The difficult thing about persuasion is to know the mind of the person one is trying to persuade and to be able to fit one’s words into it… The important thing in persuasion is to learn how to play up the aspects that the person you are talking to is proud of, and play down the aspects he is ashamed of.”

Tzu was talking about an audience of one, which affords a speaker the luxury of being able to fully tailor their message to that person (is your boyfriend’s mother a wine connoisseur who might enjoy a bottle of chianti, or does she not drink at all?). In other situations, the audience may change from one moment to the next: that last shoe customer was very concerned about price, but this next customer is fashion-conscious. Speakers who address crowds of people, or writers who craft messages that could be read by anyone, must contend with the challenge of appealing to many different kinds of people at once. Unlike the President giving a speech in the Senate chamber, that they can’t see with their eyes how their messages are being received by the different audience segments.