This Issues in Communication narrative is designed to provoke individual thought or discussion about concepts raised in the chapter.

Huan Yi works for a company that sells financial software to small- and medium-size businesses; his job is to show customers how to use the new software. He spends two weeks with each client demonstrating the features and functions of the software most applicable to the client’s needs. The first few months on the job were difficult—he often left a client feeling that even after two weeks he hadn’t been able to show the employees everything they needed to know. It’s not that they weren’t interested—they obviously appreciated his instruction and showed a desire to learn. Huan couldn’t figure out if the software was difficult for them to understand or if he was not doing a good job of teaching.

During the next few months, Huan started to see some patterns. He would get to a new client site and spend the first week going over the software with the employees—what it could do, how it worked, and what they needed to learn. He usually did this instruction in shifts, with different groups of employees listening to him lecture. He had developed one handout, but he mostly relied on the company’s manual to determine what topics to cover. He always reached his goal of going over the manual from cover to cover with each group of employees. Then he would spend the next week installing the program and helping individuals troubleshoot.

Huan realized that during the week of troubleshooting and answering questions, he ended up addressing the same issues over and over, especially about technical terms and functions. He was frustrated because he felt that these topics had been covered very well during the first week. He was also annoyed because most of the individuals with whom he worked seemed to have retained very little information from the first week. They asked very basic questions and often needed prompting from beginning to end. At first he wondered if these people were just a little slow, but then he began to get the distinct feeling that some of the problem might be his style of presenting the information.

Apply what you have learned about the informative speech as you ponder and discuss the following questions: What was Huan’s immediate behavioral goal? Was he successful in reaching this goal? In what specific ways would an understanding of information hunger and relevance, extrinsic motivation, informative content, and information overload give Huan insight into what is going wrong? What skills could Huan use to become a more effective informative speaker?