Every time a speech is delivered to an audience, that audience will be made up of very different people coming together for one moment. Sometimes they’ll have common factors, maybe age or gender or similar cultures, but more often than not they will come from very different places and carry unique and diverse value systems and cultural expectations.

In this section, we’ll define culture and investigate how to deliver a speech to a diverse audience. We’ll specifically engage with how knowing about the demographics of the audience—socioeconomic status, political and religious views and values, and gender identities—will shape the speaker’s selection of language, examples, illustrations, etc., within the body of the speech.

This section will also define what culture is and what culture does in terms of its influences on communication styles and preferences to further help the speaker to engage their target audience.

We’ll also observe how cultural intelligence can help make our messages speak to a wider audience and resonate within a variety of cultural contexts.