The Audience’s Listening Responsibilities

UNDERSTAND BEFORE CRITICIZING

Skilled listeners are open minded and make sure they understand a speaker before reacting to what they’ve heard. As a responsible listener, you should acknowledge that your feelings about and responses to other speakers are at least partly determined by your personal beliefs and experiences. Recognizing this perfectly human tendency will help you listen more thoughtfully and will put you in the right frame of mind to understand a speaker’s message on its own terms. Use the golden listening rule: listen to a speaker as you would have them listen to you.

There are times when you may be offended or angered by what you hear. What should you do? As an effective listener, you should pause, maintain your concentration, and make sure that you accurately comprehend the speaker’s message. In other words: listen before you leap. This doesn’t mean you approve of or condone what someone says. Rather, you are deciding whether and how to react after determining if you’ve accurately understood the speaker’s intended message.

USE YOUR EXTRA THOUGHT SPEED

Thought speed is the speed at which most people can think, as opposed to the speed at which they speak. Most speakers talk at a rate of 150 to 175 words per minute. If thoughts were measured in words per minute, most of us can think at three or four times the rate at which we speak.⁸ Thus, for every minute we listen to another person’s presentation, we have enough spare time to consider about 400 words’ worth of thoughts.

So what do you do with all that extra thinking time? Poor listeners may use their extra thought time to daydream, have side conversations, take unnecessary notes, or plan how to confront a speaker. But effective listeners use that time to:

• Assess the speaker’s CREDIBILITY (74–81), qualifications, and potential biases
• Identify the presentation’s key points and summarize the CENTRAL IDEA (156–57)
• Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the speaker’s SUPPORTING MATERIALS (134–51) and PERSUASIVE STRATEGIES (437–57)
• Weigh the relevance and practicality of the speaker’s remarks

TAKE USEFUL NOTES

Skilled notetakers recall messages better than non-notetakers. The key word is skilled. If you spend all your time taking notes or writing down almost every word you hear, you can’t observe the speaker’s nonverbal behavior or devote thinking time to assessing and responding to what the speaker says. Skilled notetakers select key words and phrases they want to remember or challenge. If speakers put almost every word they say on projected slides, don’t be seduced into copying what’s on the screen. Instead, listen to the speaker, read the slide (if you’re given enough time to do that), and write down a short phrase to summarize the message in that portion of the talk.

When taking notes, use the method that works best for you. Some research demonstrates that we remember what we write more than what we type, because taking notes by hand helps you focus on the speaker and their message.⁹ But some listeners prefer or need to take notes on a digital device. Use the method that will allow you to write and reference useful notes when you need them.