Benefits to the Listener. Charlatans often try to cover up a lack of substance or reasoning with a glib presentation or with irrelevant appeals.How many times have you seen attractive, scantily clad young men and women appearing in ads to sell everything from soft drinks to automatic transmission repair services?
Or consider ads that rely on celebrity endorsements. What are the ads really selling?’0 Ads may also ask you to buy what “doctors” recommend without explaining the credentials of these “doctors”—Ph.D.s in history may know very little about vitamins! Finally, political hucksters may hope that you won’t notice their substitution of assertion for evidence, their appeals to prejudice in the place of good reasons. Effective listening skills may help ward off such deception.
Listening skills also have broad application to your academic and professional life. Students who listen effectively earn better grades and achieve beyond expectation. The reasons would seem obvious: Effective listeners learn to concentrate on what is being said and to identify what is important. They motivate themselves to learn by exploring the value of information for their lives. The most effective student listeners read assignments ahead of time to familiarize themselves with the language and to provide a foundation for understanding. By listening well to the speeches presented in your class, you can discover the kinds of subjects that interest your classmates. You can also learn from their experience what techniques work best and the mistakes you should avoid. By observing how they structure, support, and deliver their speeches, you can tell why one presentation works better than another.