attentieness

1. Being a Good Listener
Listen
Give Time
Restate
Summarize
Ask
Questions

2. As a good audience…
• Being concentrated.
• Listening carefully.
• Responding properly.
• Evaluating objectively.

3. Listening

4. • Seeing ≠ Looking. Hearing ≠ Listening
• Looking & Listening require effort and concentration.
• Three types of listening
– Listening for enjoyment
– Listening for information
– Critical listening (questioning + evaluating)

5. Bad Listening Habits
• Being distracted by the speaker’s appearance or
delivery.
• Deciding the topic is boring
• Faking attention
• Looking for distractions
• Concentrating on unimportant details.
• Reacting emotionally to trigger words.

6. “ Being distracted by the speaker’s
appearance or delivery.”
• Symptom: concentrate on the speaker’s speech
patterns, gestures, postures, clothes, or appearance.
• Cure: Concentrate on what the speaker is saying, not
on how he or she looks or sounds.

7. “Deciding the topic is boring”
• Symptom: decide in advance that what the speaker
is going to say will be boring, and use this prejudice
as an excuse not to listen.
• Cure: never take the attitude “I must sit through
another boring talk.” Adopt the attitude “I may as
well listen since I’m already here.”

8. “Faking attention”
• Symptom: pretend to be listening, but the minds are
on other things.  daydreaming, planning other
things, thinking about other problems.
• Cure: don’t just pretend to pay attention. Be sincere
and take a real interest in the person speaking to
you.

9. “Looking for distractions”
• Symptom: allow himself/herself to be distracted by
their surroundings.  looking out the windows,
playing with a pencil, observing how people in the
room are dressed.
• Cure: concentrate!! Refuse to allow distractions to
take your mind off the speaker. Develop the
willpower to ignore them.

10. “Concentrating on unimportant details.”
• Symptom: concentrate on specific details, and miss
the speaker’s main points.
• Cure: pay attention to the general purpose of the
message rather than to insignificant details.

11. “Reacting emotionally to trigger words.”
• Symptom: some people ignore or distort what a
speaker is saying because they react emotionally to
“trigger words.”
• Cure: identify the trigger words that affect you. 
remain objective and concentrate on the speaker’s
message.

12. Responding

13. Audience response
• As for a speaker: by noting the responses of your
listeners and changing your conversation to adapt to
their responses, you are using feedback to improve
your effectiveness.
• As for a listener: your comments, postures, and
gestures all tell the speaker how you are reacting to
the speech.

14. Feedback
• Feedback: any part of a system’s (speaker’s) product
(message) that is returned to the system (speaker) to
enable it to modify further products (message).  a
method for checking that a desired result is being
achieved.
• Anticipating feedback
• During-the-speech feedback
• Evaluating feedback

15. Feedback Loops

16. Evaluating

17. Evaluation
• Consider what there is about the product (speech) that makes
it appealing or unappealing.
• To evaluate by the results
– What the intended results are.
– Decide if the results of the speech have been met.
• To evaluate by the content
– A speech to inform should develop a topic with new and
important information.
• To evaluate by the ethics
– Ethics is a set of beliefs about what is right and wrong.

18. Suggestions of evaluating
• Be positive about the good parts of the speech.
• Give suggestions for improvement of sth that was incorrect.
• Do not make personal comments.
• Be fair. Every speech will not be perfect.
• Do not judge solely on your personal opinion.
• Do not compare a speaker to others.
• Describe what you liked or disliked in specific terms.
• Emphasize comments about things the speakers has control
over and can adjust.