Chapter 3, 4, & 6

Chapter 3: Topic Selection and Purpose

General Speaking Purpose

• Informative speech: provides an audience with new, unique, and/or innovative knowledge on a distinct topics

  • Engaging story with a lesson to learn; it could also explain or clarify a difficult topic

  • Ex. Professor delivering lecture

• Persuasive speech: most, but it could be all elements that inform but uses the information to change the audience’s attitudes, opinions, or behaviors

  • Ex. Ads

• Speech Marking a Special Occasion/Entertaining Audiences: amuses, commemorates, arouses interest, diverts attention, or warms up audience for larger event

  • Ex. Toast for a wedding

• 3 can mix

Topic Selection and Refinement

• Follow current events to find constant sources of topic ideas

• Social Media Share Test: Indivduals that come across new information that excites them to share with everyone they know and it could be a good presentation

• Nested Brainstorming:

  • 60 seconds or less compose a list of 10 general subject areas interesting to share

  • Circle 3-5 topics that seem the most interesting

  • Rank those 3-5 topics in order of most to least interesting

  • Take the 1st topic and make 3 subtopics (if the topic is too difficult to break down then skip to the next)

  • Rank those subtopics in most interesting

  • The 1st one will be the topic you discuss

Topic Considerations

• Follow time restriction placed on speech

  • If it’s 6-8 mins, speaker would avoid selecting topics that are too broad

  • Avoid topics that are too narrow

  • Avoid trying to inform audience about information they already know

  • Avoid going overly deep into a topic without presenting background information first

Specific Purpose

• Funnel Approach: Moving from general information toward more specific information

  • Whar do I talk about → What do I want my audience to know or do once they leave the room

  • Inform the audience about __, to persuade the audience to __

• Specific purpose should only address one idea

• Choose specific purpose carefully and from that point all of the speech will go towards the specific purpose

Central Idea

• Central Idea: expressed as a single sentence that articulates as one thought that the presenter wants the audience to remember at the end of the speech

  • Aka Thesis Statement → presents assertion or proposition that speaker must then support with evidence

  • Not the Specific Purpose

  • Answer the specific purpose

  • May remain flexible until the information is known about their preferences

Titling Speech

• Title to speech is like a cover to a book

Chapter 4: Analyzing the Audience

• Care deeply about your audience

• Create an Audience-centered speech

  • adds value and meaning to information presented by remaining mindful of what the audience members know about the topic and how they feel

Collecting Audience Data

• Know information about the audience’s demographics

Survey Research

• Open-ended questions → no definitive answers, allows survey respondents to answer with anything they see fit

• Close-ended questions → limit the number of responses a respondent may offer such as either or questions, multiple choice questions, and scaled questions

• Conducting a survey:

  • Face-to-face informal interview

    • Social Desirability bias: the tendency for most people to bend the truth slightly on surveys to make themselves seem better than they actually are

  • Single sign-up or pass-around sheet

    • Groupthink: the tendency for people to respond how the majority of others have responded before them even if they don’t truly feel that way

  • Create Online Surveys

    • Responses are low

  • Paper Survey

    • Represent the best of all possible benefits

• Length of surveys are varied depending on the topics

Maintaining Surprise

• Surveys help speakers more specifically tailor information they choose to use within speech

Chapter 6: Organizing the Idea

• Outlining: Helps speakers arrange the larger ideas into a manageable order

  • Helps ensure that both the introduction and conclusion effectively frame those larger ideas into a memorable format for audience

Purpose of Introduction

• Set hook by capturing audience’s interest

• Opportunity to deliver the core message to the audience (thesis or central idea) and give preview of most important elements of the idea

  • Grab Attention

  • Relate to audience

  • Establish credibility

  • Provide core of speech

Creating the Introduction Step 1: Grab Attention

• Speaker that gets up before an audience and “warms up” with casual greeting, small talk, and an awkward announcement of topic tends to put off most audiences’ attention spans

• How to grab audience’s attention:

  • Quotations

    • Provides wisdom from well-respected source that says something valuable or profound in much fewer words

    • Works great at beginning and ending of speeches

  • Stories

    • Personalize topic by helping audience members identify with characters, events or places within the sotry

    • Can entertain and engage

    • Presents what if

  • Asking Questions

    • Rhetorical Questions work great → question designed to evoke a thought or emotive response

    • Gets audience thinking straight to the main idea of the speech

    • Uses skill and inexperienced public speakers should avoid using these until they have some experience

    • Deliver the question slowly and give a pause to the audience so that they can think upon that

  • Unexpected Information

    • Arrive at an unexpected conclusion

    • Stimulate audience’s curiousity and keep them listening for more useful information

  • Visual Aids and Demonstrations

    • Provide audience with a visually compelling reason to listen

  • Refer to Current or Historical Events

    • Engages audience and brings them personally closer to the topic

    • Generic yet personal

Creating the Introduction Step 2: Relate to the Audience

• Don’t tell the audience why the topic should matter to them, let it relate to them instead

Creating the Introduction Step 3: Relate to Self (Establish Credibility)

• Lets audience why they should trust or believe the speaker delivers all true information to them in presentation

• 3 components of individual credibility:

  • Competence: degree to which an audience perceives a speaker as being knowledgable or expert on given topic

  • Trustworthiness: degree to which an audience member perceives a speaker as having honest and sincere qualities

  • Caring/Goodwill: degree to which audience members perceive a speaker as genuinely caring about them

Creating the Introduction Step 4: The Core of the Speech

• Central Idea

  • Speakers should boil down all ideas they want to express into speech to one declarative sentence

  • Serves as central idea

  • Tie together all main points and their supporting ideas

  • Thesis statement

• Preview of points

  • Provides audience with set of mental bookmarks to help organize the information in their minds

  • Maintains the attention spans

• Purpose of introduction

  • Orient audience to topic

  • Set tone for the remainder of speech

  • Hook audience’s attention and show that their investment of time and energy spent listening will seem worth it in the end

Composing the body of the speech

• Avoiding combining too much information into a single point

• Primary effect and Recency effect

  • Listeners best recall information presented first and last

• How to arrange their information

  • Chronological Pattern: Arrange information in time-based sequence

  • Spatial Pattern: arrange information according physical proximity to one another

  • Cause-Effect Pattern: Shows the relationship between certain causes and their effects

  • Problem-Solution Pattern: Presents problem and provides solution to problem

  • Topical Pattern: Breaking topic into smaller topics

Transitions

• Information should “flow” together

• Sound conversational

• Guide and direct where the speech/information is headed

• Bridge: a single sentence that links prior information with a preview of upcoming information

  • Create sentence with 2 parts

    • First half is sumary

    • Second half is brief preview

• Signpost: Phrases that signal listeners in a literal or explicit sense to the direction of the speech

• Spotlight: Shares similarity to eye-catching headlines broadcast on a viral social media article

  • Builds curiosity through suspense

  • Spotlights upcoming information

Signaling the End

• Concludes the last supporting point within final main point

• Don’t use “In conclusion”

• Add creative touches to the conclusion

Concluding the Speech

• Restate the Central Idea

  • Don’t repeat the same central idea

  • Make it more creative, rephrase it

  • Be direct and clear about the main idea

• Recap Main Ideas

  • Tell them what you told them portion of presentation

  • Review the main points you talked in the speech

  • Repetition works for this one

  • Never include new information at this point

• Clincher

  • Acts similar to an attention getter but occurs at the end of the speech instead of the beginning

    • Use a quotation

      • Powerful quote can illustrate the topic that also reinforces the central idea

    • Use a narrative

      • Story split: introduces the story in the beginning of the speech and then saves dramatic ending for the conclusion

    • Reference to Introduction

      • Can try other methods to bring speech around all full circle to whatever concept was introduced within the introduction

Important Guidelines for Conclusions

• Avoid lengthy conclusions

  • Never include new material

  • End strong

    • Don’t rush the conclusion