Chapter 2 Listening and Ethics of speech -Speech Craft PDF

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Speaking with an Open Ear Communication and Understanding: Listening beyond Noise An Ethics of Speaking as a Listener

What do concertgoing and public speaking have in common? Calling and responding. Whether you’re at a Jay Z, Beyoncé, or Pixies show, when you go to a concert you are asked to respond to the music based on the many ways in which the musicians “call” out to you with instruments, voices, show lights, and movements. An artist might call for you to “make some noise,” and you scream in response. The chorus of a song is also a call, perhaps stirring you to declare, “We’re never, ever, ever getting back together!” with Taylor Swift. Although different in goals, purposes, and functions, going to a concert and delivering a speech both rely on call-and-response, which is the communicative foundation of many forms of listening and speaking. For centuries, people have thought of listening as a passive activity, as if the ear were a sound receiver answering the call of another. Scenes from everyday life, however, quickly dispute any passive conception of listening: you perk up when your roommate says that she has some confidential news; a young man sings along to the music in his headphones on the subway; and a parishioner replies “Amen!” to the shout of a preacher in church. Whether at a concert or talking with a friend, observing others in public or in private spaces, listening is a dynamic and interactive process that is anything but passive.

Speaking with an Open Ear

You will learn to EXPLAIN how listening is foundational to all public speaking. DEFINE “listening” in relation to communication and public speaking. DEFINE “noise” and explain its role in public speaking. Listening is an active response to the call of another. When we answer a call — whether it is from a public figure on a big stage or from our best friend asking us a question — we are actually experiencing something universal to the human condition: responsiveness.1 There are a variety of everyday examples in which we are “called” to respond and we do so without even thinking about it: while walking down the street, an unfamiliar voice calls to you, and you respond by turning around; you receive a text message and immediately look to see who sent it; a teacher calls on you unexpectedly to answer a question, and you respond before you have time to think about the answer. In each case, someone calls for your attention and you have an impulse to respond. An interesting thing about “the call” — whether it be from a speaker, a singer, or a cell phone — is that most of us respond without thinking about it.2 And in almost every kind of example of calling we can imagine, it is this almost automatic ability to respond that makes the call possible in the first place. Without this ability, speakers wouldn’t speak and pop stars wouldn’t sing. This means that listening comes before speaking. This means that listening is prior to speaking. If we understand speaking, especially public speaking, as a form of calling to an audience, then listening is a precondition of speaking. Because any kind of speaking is a form of calling, we are enjoined to understand listening better.

What Did You Say? Understanding Listening Your public speaking class is designed to help you become more comfortable speaking to a group of others. Even so, the fact remains that for most of your life you will be a listener. As strange as it may seem now, thinking about your life as a listener can be quite helpful to you as a speaker because it will prepare you to adapt to any audience. In fact, to become a better speaker, it is essential that you practice the difficult skill of active listening. Public speaking concerns

other people to whom you call and from whom you ask for a response; before you can deliver any speech, you must first listen. If you do not understand how listening happens, it will be difficult to figure out how to speak so that others will listen to you. As we will see, a more robust understanding of listening also involves a set of moral principles that can help you become not only a more skilled speaker, but perhaps a more ethical one as well.

Defining listening Most of us have a habit of defining listening by comparing it to what listening is not. Common sense tells us that listening is the counterpart to speaking. Because we are constantly observing the responses of others when we speak to them, however, communication scholars suggest that this common distinction doesn’t hold up; research suggests that it is difficult to maintain the idea that speaking is not listening and listening is not speaking. In terms of how our brains and bodies work, we tend to speak and listen at the same time (in greater or lesser degrees). For example, when you are speaking, you’re often observing the facial expressions of others, “listening” for any verbal and nonverbal cues they send you (such as laughter at a joke, a smile, or a frown), and even hearing the sound of your own voice. You cannot help but “listen” when you speak. Recognizing the indivisible or intertwined character of speaking and listening, communication scholars tend to define listening by contrasting it with hearing, which can be confusing because many of us use the terms “listening” and “hearing” interchangeably. Were you ever told to clean your room or take out the trash and then asked, usually in an angry tone: “Do you hear me!?!!” In such a scenario, what the demander is really asking is, “Are you listening to me?” This gives us a hint about the distinction between hearing and listening: hearing is the physiological event that concerns waves of sound entering your ear, greeting your eardrum, and firing up neurons in your brain. Hearing is a physical event. We hear things all the time without listening to them. Our brains, in fact, work to “filter out” the sounds we hear every day so that we are not overwhelmed by sensory information. Listening, on the other hand — or on the other ear, rather — typically refers to the way in which we consciously and actively make sense or meaning of sound. Listening involves some degree of active attention with which we assign, or begin to assign, meaning to a sound stimulus. The attention part of listening seems to require some degree of selfconsciousness: you think to yourself, “I am hearing something meaningful.” In this respect, the

leading group of listening scholars in the United States formally defines listening as “the process of receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and/or nonverbal messages.”3 According to this broad definition, you can listen to a sneeze as much as you can listen to someone’s facial expression; what makes either “listening” is the attribution of meaning to the message. Many in the deaf community would agree that one can “listen” with his or her eyes or through the sense of touch without ever “hearing” a sound wave. For our purpose of speaking in public, then, let us say simply that listening is the process of actively making meaning of messages.

For our purpose of speaking in public, then, let us say simply that listening is the process of actively making meaning of messages. Although our culture associates listening with hearing, one can listen without actually hearing.

The challenge of listening: Noise Although we listen all of the time, the achievement of making meaning of messages is actually quite difficult. Our brains help us do a lot of the work by attending to sensory information that we should notice, but we still have to make meaning of that information by actively interpreting it. The problem with actively interpreting information from any of our senses is there is a lot of “noise” that gets in the way. For example, if you are hungry, you may find it difficult to listen to your instructor’s lecture because images of food keep popping up in your head. Sometimes in speaking situations a chatty audience can make it difficult to actively interpret and understand what a speaker is saying. In short: listening is hard because of interference. This interference, or noise, is defined as anything that distorts or distracts from a message. Technicians who work on your Internet connection or cable service often refer to interruptions to your carrier signal as noise. What is the difference between listening and hearing? Is it possible to listen without hearing, or to hear without listening? Why or why not?

Most people think of noise as only concerning sounds, such as a loud jackhammer, your neighbor’s motorcycle, or Norwegian death metal. Because “listening” is a metaphor for

attending to all sorts of information, in the public speaking situation we shouldn’t reduce noise to only sounds. We can experience noise in our own minds as well, such as distracting thoughts, hunger pangs, or even when we get excited or have depressed feelings. Anything that gets in the way of attaching meaning to what someone is trying to communicate can be “noise.”

Noise The noise of a particular listening/speaking situation can make communicating quite difficult!

The first callout reading, “I’m a little nervous about this speech—is it going OK?” points toward the woman giving the speech. The second callout reading, “Someone didn’t silence their phone!” points toward a woman sitting in the first row of the class. The third callout reading, “It’s freezing in here! Why didn’t i bring my sweater?” points toward a woman sitting in the fourth row of the class. The fourth callout reading, “I disagree with her political views” points toward a man sitting in the last row. The fifth callout reading, “What time is lunch again? Do I want a sandwich or a salad . . . ?” points toward another man sitting in the fourth row of the class.

If you keep in mind that the word “noise” is derived from the term “nausea,” it will be easier to remember that it can refer to both environmental distractions and internal states of mind and body. Consequently, we can discern two kinds of noise: ● external noise: Anything in a communication environment that one can sense or feel that distracts, or can distract, from a message. This includes everything from room temperature, street sounds, the failure of a microphone, and distorted feedback to applause and laughter, a fire alarm or cell phone ringing, even your own hiccups. ● internal noise: Any thoughts, feelings, or bodily disturbances — such as a stomach growl that only you can hear — that distract you from attending to a message. Internal noise includes beliefs, attitudes, and values that get in the way of clearly or more fully listening to what a speaker has to say. “Hearing what you want to hear,” as the common phrase goes, is a kind of internal noise.

While external and internal noise can be managed, we tend to think about noise as something that is often beyond our control. Noise will happen, and you cannot always plan for it. We will discuss how you can plan to minimize external and internal noise as a speaker in the next chapter, especially when discussing physical settings and audience psychology. In this chapter, we will focus on what to do about noise as a listener. As a listener, external noise can be a challenge in a speaking situation. More often than not, there is little you can do to prepare for distractions that might occur in a given listening encounter: roadwork outside a building may distract you, or your cell phone carrier may drop you in the middle of a call. If you know that you are easily distracted by environmental noise in a listening encounter, you might plan to sit closer to a speaker. If you use sign language, you might check to see if someone will be interpreting for you. Whether you are going to be at a concert or in a classroom, try to anticipate what the environmental conditions might be and plan ahead. Internal noise, however, is the strangest kind of distraction to anticipate. For many speaking situations in which we are asked to listen, we do not know in advance exactly what will be said, and consequently, we cannot always predict how our minds and bodies will react. This unpredictability is why managing internal noise is the greatest challenge of listening. Fortunately for us, there has been a lot of research on this challenge. In the next section, we’ll examine this research to better understand the importance of active listening for achieving an understanding with others. What is noise? What are the different types of noise? How can you control for noise?

Communication and Understanding: Listening beyond Noise You will learn to DEFINE communication.

DEFINE active listening. LIST the steps of active listening.

Rethinking Noise: There Are Always Two Messages The internal noise we experience when communicating with others often has to do with our own self-concept or identity. When you speak to me, I am not only trying to understand or interpret what you are saying (the message) but also thinking about (and feeling) what your message says about me, as a person. In other words, every message sent between or among people is fundamentally about identity. Messages contain both a “content” (or meaning) that we share, as well as information about who we are to each other: I am a teacher, you are a student; you are a listener (or reader), I am a speaker (or author). When you take part in any listening situation, you bring your self-understanding with you, and that self-understanding is often addressed in listening and speaking, even if you’re not consciously thinking about it. (Reading this, you might be thinking, “So why is this relevant to me?”) In short, anything that means something to us implies an identity.

There are always two messages when communicating: what a speaker believes he or she is saying, and what a listener believes he or she is hearing.

The top half of the rectangle shows mouth of a speaker wide open and the text “messages” coming from the mouth. The surrounding arrows show how the sound travels forward and back to the speaker. The other half of the rectangle shows the ear of a person with the text “message” near the ear. The surrounding arrows show how the sound travels forward and back to the listener.

Taking the internal noise of our self-identities into account, some thinkers have argued that communication as pure or absolute understanding is impossible. What speakers and listeners actually do when communicating is coordinate their behaviors through language. Whether or not pure or absolute understanding is possible, we do know that people can and do coordinate their thoughts and behaviors and understand each other meaningfully with language. So, instead of

thinking about communication as a kind of mind meld, let’s think of it as a kind of interaction or dance: communication is the coordination of behavior through symbols. For this dance of meaning to be successful, whatever the content of the message may be, speakers and listeners must also navigate their own identities. What such a view of communication implies is that whenever we speak and whenever we listen, we’re not simply coordinating what we say but also coordinating who we are to each other. In light of the internal noise of identity that communicating entails, we can presume a rule or motto for understanding speaking and listening: there are always two messages. For example, as a speaker, there are always two kinds of speeches: the one you deliver, and the one the audience hears. As a listener, there are always two kinds of speeches: what the speaker says, and what you actually respond to. We could say, then, that effective listening and speaking reduces to the moments when the two messages line up or overlap. When these two messages misalign or don’t overlap, we have misunderstanding. As a listener, accepting the fact that there are two messages means that misunderstanding happens more often than people think it does. Avoiding misunderstanding can be difficult. When we listen to others, we have to navigate both what is said as well as what the saying implies about ourselves (e.g., emotional cues about the relationship). Researchers have tended to focus on this identity-related internal noise problem as one of selective perception, and the remedy as one of active perceiving. Let’s turn to a discussion of these two concepts as they relate to selective listening and active listening.

Misunderstanding For centuries, the formal study of misunderstanding in communication has been aligned with the successes and failures of a speaker in respect to the proper meaning of words. In the last century, however, scholars have been studying the central role of the listener and noise, broadening the more narrow understanding of persuasive speaking, or “rhetoric,” as the crafting of a certain meaning by a speaker. For example, literary critic and theorist I. A. Richards argued that “rhetoric should be the study of misunderstanding and its remedies.” We might say the basic communication model is founded on the misguided assumption of what Richards called “the Proper Meaning Superstition”: that every word spoken “has a meaning of its own . . . independent of and controlling its

use.” Such a view ignores the reality that words have multiple meanings and, by extension, overlooks the fact that speech implies relational information, too.4

Selective and Active Listening: Moving toward Understanding Read any conflicting reviews of a new album and one thing is obvious: each music critic listened to a different album. One reviewer found Kanye West’s latest album to be the best hip-hop record of all time, while another found the music unworthy of distribution. What accounts for the different opinions? Many things, including the circumstances in which they listened to the album, with all its accompanying distractions (external noise), but also their tastes, their politics and values, and most certainly their identities as people and as critics. When we perceive the world, we come to it with a set of beliefs, attitudes, and values that influences our perceptions. In general, these influences inform what is known as selective perception, or the ways in which we choose to pay attention to something as meaningful, important, and relevant. Researchers have found that one of the key perceptual differences between older humans and infants concerns an older person’s ability to selectively attend to stimuli from the environment. As we grow older, we develop both cognitive and personality-based “filters” for attending to one thing while ignoring other things. Selective perception, in other words, is an observational skill that we develop out of necessity to perceive the world. We cannot help but selectively perceive because we have to for the world to make any sense. For most of us, how we selectively perceive the messages coming from others is highly refined and grafted onto our identities as individuals.5 Media scholars — and in particular those concerned with cultural differences such as gender, race, and political affiliation — are especially interested in how audiences expose themselves to some messages while avoiding others (also known as selective exposure).6 Although selective perception research extends across all the senses, a great deal of effort has been spent on understanding selective listening, or the ways in which people perceive the spoken messages of others. This research supports what you probably already anticipate in your “selective reading”: that people tend to listen to what they believe is important or relevant to them, and that they tend to listen in a way that reinforces or is informed by what they already know. For example, cable television audiences have a number of “news” channels that claim to present information about world events in objective terms. And yet we all

know that those who listen to the Fox News channel tend to identify as “conservative,” and those who listen to MSNBC tend to identify as “liberal.” Consequently, the audiences of these different media outlets selectively expose ...