Listening Critically

Before you analyze Ronald Reagan's speech using the rhetorical situation framework, you should understand how to listen critically to the message, a skill that will help you be a better critic.

Chapter 4 in Dr. Zarefsky's text reviews basic listening skills and reasons to listen carefully and critically. These will serve you well whenever you listen to a speech as a citizen-critic in public life or when you are thinking about the listening you ask your audience to do when you prepare and give a speech. The skills can also be adapted for your work as a rhetorical critic when you listen to the Challenger address and to the speech you have chosen to study for the Rhetorical Situation speech assignment.

Critical thinking plays an important role in effective listening. Not only do you listen for the content and the art of the speaker, you also consider how you can express your judgments and defend your analysis of the speech. Usually, we can defend our judgments about speeches by using the evaluation standards discussed in Chapter 4. The fitting response in the rhetorical situation is one standard of judgment; successfully achieving the purpose for the speech is another; and ethics provides standards of judgment, as do the principles of criticism.

Listening is hard work. Effective listening matches the effort put in by the speaker (and sometimes exceeds it) in the interest of making decisions in public life, in making judgments about the quality of speeches, and in learning from other speakers how we can prepare our own speeches well. The hard work is rewarded, of course, when we can see clearly just how good a speech can be.