Aristotle's model for communication focuses heavily on the importance of understanding one's audience. In order to employ effective audience-centered communication, the speaker must employ ethos to gain their trust, pathos to make an emotional connection, and logos so that they can best understand the speaker's point. In order to achieve all this, it is critical to have a deep understanding of who you are talking to.
This is as relevant today as it was during Aristotle's time. I would guess that all of us have been subjected to a speaker at some time who did not understand how to make this important connection with their audience. It is all too easy to ignore or dismiss what that person is trying to communicate if they fail to achieve even one of the elements of good rhetoric mentioned above.
Effective speakers must strive to know what their audience expects and wants to hear, as well as how to best connect with them. Failing to do this results in a failure to properly communicate and make one's point. As a result, Aristotle, as well as all effective and accomplished public speakers, spend a lot of time, energy, and focus on getting to understand their audience. Failing to do so makes any speech ineffective, no matter how valid its argument.
Being audience-centered is one of the crucial elements of delivering a powerful speech. Simply put, Aristotle knew that he had to craft and present a speech that would appeal to his listeners. If he could not grab their attention, then his speech would fall on "deaf ears" and he would not be able to persuade or to motivate them to consider his ideas.
In today's world, before we speak in front of an audience, we need to have some basic knowledge of who will be listening and what their needs are. This helps us to fine-tune our speech and also helps us gauge how to deliver it.
Being audience-centered also involves eye contact with the listeners. Making eye contact keeps the audience engaged with you, the speaker. Speaking over their heads, or looking down at the ground does not keep the audience involved.
Preparing a well-written speech is but one part of being an effective speaker. Knowing the audience and remaining connected with them, being audience-centered, is what makes the speech powerful.
Aristotle's philosophy remains strong today in the world of public speaking because it is a highly useful tool for delivering effective speeches.
People are interested and most keen on listening when they are engaged. Aristotle's "audience-centered" philosophy, conceived in he 300's BC, discerns that a successful speaker recognizes the needs of their audience, leveraging information to them and taking into account the reason listeners chose to be present to the information being shared. Aristotle's philosophy continues to resonate these many centuries later as people continue to gravitate towards speakers that resonate with them in both agreement and opposition. Humans are curious, inherently born to thrive and evolve, we often gather together to share and learn, most especially when information is being shared by a speaker that has formulated information that resonates with their audience. To speak with no regard for the needs of an audience, is to waste the time of the speaker and all individuals involved. Information, skill, agendas and the world conversation in general continue to shift and evolve; however, the task of a skilled speaker, remains threaded in Aristotle's centuries old philosophy of "audience-centered," where a cycle of communication is created by a speaker who has formulated and acted upon their intention of authentically engaging and leveraging information to their audience, ultimately creating interest in their listeners.
Aristotle simply means that, when preparing a speech, it's important to bear in mind your target audience, the people who are actually going to hear you speak. This is a very important consideration to take into account if the speaker is going to get his message across effectively. Like most ancient thinkers, Aristotle was a firm believer in the importance of rhetoric, or the art of persuasion. And the primary purpose of making a speech is to persuade your audience of the point that you're making. Hence the necessity of the speaker's focusing his attention on the potential reaction of his audience when writing and preparing a speech.
These days, rhetoric tends to be associated in the popular mind with empty words and shameless manipulation, the province of insincere politicians who will say anything to get elected. Yet Aristotle's rhetorical model of communication still has something to say to us in this more skeptical age of ours. So long as someone has something to sell, whether it's a policy platform or a new brand of detergent, they will need to persuade other people of its benefits. And this is where focusing attention on audience reaction comes in. No amount of fine speeches or fancy words will make the slightest bit of difference to whatever it is that's being communicated unless the potential audience and its needs are taken into consideration by the speaker.
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