Question

speech

Describe a real-life scenario in which the speaker's visual aids might detract from the desired audience response. Be specific in explaining what went wrong with the visual aids and suggest alternative visual aids to remedy the situation. Compare and contrast the advantages and disadvantages of the visual aids you might use in an upcoming speech.

Answer 1

Visual Aids are used by oraters in speeches to make the speech more effective and understandable to the audience. As it is proved that seeing makes a greater impact on the audience than listening. Hence these aids are used to make the message conveyed in a better and effective way. But The aids if defective or wrongly used can become a barrier in the message delivery or an obstacle to understand the message. For example, the US wireless data market powerpoint is a presentation that has too much of texts on each slide making it difficult and uninteresting for the audience to attract towards it to read it through. It has text overloaded right from the first slide which makes the audience loose interest from the begining itself. Lack of images and graphs and just overloading of texts also makes the presentation unattractive. Powerpoint presentations is used as a guideline for the audience who are listening to the orater to understand what he is saying in short bullet points. These bullet points should be short framed sentences and just a few in number on a slide so that the audience can follow it along with listening to the orator. The text should also be of larger fonts and bright colours that will attract the audiences' attention. Hence a powerpoint presentation with wrong features is a visual aid failure as not only will it distract the audience from understanding the message but also give no outcome that would possibly come without the use of it.

The visual aid that I might use in my speech would be slides. The advantages of this aid can be that they look professional in appearance, clarity in text through short bullet points, convinient for conveying a message together for a large number of people. The disadvantages of the same can be that it is formal method and does not involve people individually, does not allow discussion as a larger group is involved and is shown in the dark and it requires equipments for displaying the slides.