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What do you need to know and do in PS? - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Think about what the speaker is saying, summarize the speaker’s thoughts, formulate questions, and draw connections between what the speaker says and what you already know. At the same time, avoid focusing on external issues—with what you did last Saturday or your plans for this evening.
    - - Listening is hard, so be prepared to participate actively. Avoid “the entertainment syndrome,” the expectation that you’ll be amused and entertained by a speaker (Floyd, 1985). Set aside distractions (cell phones, laptops, and headphones) so that your listening task will have less competition.
    - - Resist assuming that what you have to say is more valuable than the speaker’s remarks.
    - - Resist assuming that what you have to say is more valuable than the speaker’s remarks.
  - - - These might include nodding your head, smiling, or positioning yourself to listen more closely. Listen in a way that demonstrates that what the speaker is saying is important. In some cultures, polite listening cues must be cues of agreement (Japanese culture is often used as an example); in other cultures, polite listening cues are attentiveness and support rather than cues of agreement
    - - Demonstrate that you understand and feel the speaker’s thoughts and feelings by giving responses that show this level of understanding—smiling or cringing or otherwise echoing the feelings of the speaker. If you echo the speaker’s nonverbal expressions, your behavior is likely to be seen as empathic.
    - - In much of the United States this is perhaps the single most important rule. If you don’t maintain eye contact when someone is giving a speech, then you’ll appear not to be listening—and definitely not listening politely.
    - - Throughout the listening encounter, though perhaps especially after the speaker has finished, positive feedback will be seen as polite and negative feedback as impolite. If you must give negative feedback, then do so in a way that does not attack the person. For example, first mention areas of agreement and what you liked about what the person said and stress your good intentions.
  - - - Recognize both consistent and inconsistent “packages” of messages, and take these cues as guides for drawing inferences
        about the meaning the speaker is trying to communicate. Ask questions when in doubt.
    - - Connect the specifics to the speaker’s general theme rather than merely remembering isolated facts and figures.
    - - Don’t disregard the literal (surface) meaning of the speech in your attempt to uncover the more hidden (deeper) meanings.
    - - You don’t want to hear that something you believe is untrue or to be told that people you respect are behaving unethically, yet these are the very messages you need to listen to with great care. If you filter out this kind of information, you risk failing to correct misinformation. You risk losing new and important insights.
  - - - Before you can understand what the speaker is saying, you have to see the message from the speaker’s vantage point. Try putting yourself in the role of the speaker and looking at the topic from his or her perspective.
    - - Don’t consider your listening task complete until you’ve understood what the speaker is feeling as well as thinking.
    - - In other words, avoid listening for positive statements about friends and negative statements about enemies. For example, if you dislike Fred, make the added effort to listen objectively to Fred’s speeches or to comments that might reflect positively on Fred.
    - - Offensive listening is the tendency to listen to bits and pieces of information that will enable you to attack the speaker or to find fault with something the speaker has said.
  - - - Delay both positive and negative evaluation until you’ve fully understood the intention and the content of the message being communicated. Also avoid prejudging the speech as irrelevant or uninteresting. Give the speaker a chance.
    - - Avoid distorting messages through oversimplification or leveling—the tendency to eliminate details and to simplify complex messages to make them easier to remember.
    - - A bias, prejudice, or partiality may interfere with accurate listening and cause you to distort message reception to fit your own prejudices and expectations. Biases may also lead to sharpening—an effect in which an item of information takes on increased importance because it seems to confirm your stereotypes or prejudices.
    - - The tendency to reconstruct messages so they reflect your own attitudes, prejudices, needs, and values is known as assimilation. It is the tendency to hear relatively neutral messages as supporting your own attitudes and belief
  - - - Avoid prejudging the speaker before hearing her or him out. Try to put aside prejudices and preconceptions and to evaluate the speaker’s message fairly. At the same time, try to empathize with the speaker. You don’t have to agree with the speaker, but try to understand emotionally as well as intellectually what he or she means. Then accept or reject the speaker’s ideas on the basis of the information offered— not on the basis of some bias or prejudice or incomplete
        understanding.
    - - In a learning environment such as a public speaking class, listening ethically means giving frank and constructive criticism to help the speaker improve. It also means reflecting honestly on the questions speakers raise. Much as the listener has a right to expect an active speaker, the speaker has the right to expect a listener who will actively
        deal with, rather than just passively hear, the message of a speech.
- - - - There are always positive characteristics about any speech, and it’s more productive to concentrate on these first. Thus, instead of saying (as in the above example), “The speech didn’t do anything for me,” tell the speaker what you liked first, then bring up a weak point and suggest how it might be improved
    - - When commenting on delivery, refer to such specifics as eye contact,
        vocal volume, or whatever else is of consequence. When commenting on the examples, tell the speaker why they were good. Were they realistic? Were they especially interesting? Were they presented dramatically?
    - - When criticizing a speech, transcend your own biases as best you can. Examine the speech from the point of view of a detached critic. Evaluate, for example, the validity of the arguments and their suitability to the audience, the language, and the supporting materials.
    - - For example, saying that “The introduction didn’t gain my attention” doesn’t tell the speaker how he or she might have gained your attention. Instead, you might say, “The example about the computer crash would have more effectively gained my attention in the introduction.”
    - - Focus criticism on what the speaker said and did during the actual speech. Try to avoid the very natural tendency to read the mind of the speaker—to assume that you know why the speaker did one thing rather than another.
    - - When giving criticism, own your comments; take responsibility for them. The best way to express this ownership is to use I-messages rather than you-messages. That is, instead of saying, “You needed better research,” say, “I would have been more persuaded if you had used more recent research.”
    - - A liking for the speaker shouldn’t lead you to give positive evaluations of the speech, nor should disliking the speaker lead you to give negative evaluations of the speech.The ethical critic recognizes the validity of an argument even if it contradicts a deeply held belief; similarly, he or she recognizes the fallaciousness of an argument even if it supports a deeply held belief. The ethical critic is culturally sensitive, is aware of his or her own ethnocentrism, and doesn’t negatively evaluate customs and forms of speech simply because they deviate from her or his own. Similarly, the ethical critic does not positively evaluate a speech just because it supports her or his own cultural beliefs and values. The ethical critic does not discriminate againstor favor speakers simply because they’re of a particular sex, race, nationality, religion, age group, or affectional orientation.
  - - - Recognize that when some aspect of your speech is criticized, your personality or your worth as an individual isn’t being criticized or attacked. Listen to speech criticism with the same detachment that you’d use in listening to a biology instructor help you adjust the lens on the microscope or a computer expert tell you how to import photos into your blog.
    - - If you don’t understand the criticism, ask for clarification. For example, if you’re told that your specific purpose was too broad but it’s unclear to you how you might narrow it, ask the critic to explain—being careful not to appear defensive or confrontational.
    - - Listen to criticism with an open mind, and let the critics know that you’re really paying attention to what they have to say. In this way you’ll encourage critics to share their perceptions more freely; in the process you’ll gain greater insight into how you come across to an audience.
    - - The suggestion to listen open-mindedly to criticism does not mean that you should do as critics say. Instead, evaluate what the critics suggest; perhaps even try out the suggestions (in your next rehearsal or in the actual speech); but then make your own decisions as to what criticisms you’ll follow totally, what you’ll modify and adapt, and what you’ll reject.
    - - Criticism reflects the listener’s perception. Because of this the critic is always right. If the critic says that he or she wasn’t convinced by your evidence, consider why your evidence was not convincing. Perhaps you didn’t make clear how the evidence was connected to your thesis or perhaps you raced through it too quickly.