Chp 16: Informative Speaking

Chp 16: Informative Speaking

BOOK: pgs. 241-253

PDF: pgs. 251-263

What you need to Know

• To inform versus to persuade
• Ways to organize your speech: spatial, chronological, cause-effect, problem-situation, topical ways to help audience understand speech concepts: repetition, provide rewards, show and tell, build on base knowledge and provide new insight, use humor, ask questions to see if they understand

Informative Speaking

• Information speeches - speeches that teach something new
  • Inform: Make the audience aware of a phenomenon
  • Explain it to them to deepen their understanding

Information We Explain

• Objects - tangible items
  • Artifacts, mementos, souvenirs, buildings, places, or even people
• Processes - explains the steps needed to accomplish something; usually arranged chronologically
  • “How to” speech intended to teach the audience how to accomplish something
  • Explain processes specific to a particular industry
  • Explain how things happen in science and medicine
• Events - focus on something that happened, is happening, or might happen at some point in the future.
  • Often organized chronologically
  • Allows the speaker to explain the event as it unfolds
  • Could be arranged topically, especially when many things are happening simultaneously
• Concepts - explains an abstract idea instead of a concrete object
  • Presentations about theories, ideas, religions, economics, political ideology, or laws.
  • Challenging; they require the speaker to take something abstract and intangible and make it easy for the audience to understand by
  • Vivid descriptions, examples, or illustrations.

Patterns of Organization

• Spatial: how parts are physically related to one another
• Chronological: how events or processes occur in time
• Cause-effect: how causes led to outcomes
• Problem-solution: how solutions address problems
• Topical: dividing by categories or subtopics

Difficult Concepts

• According to Dr. Katherine Rowan, there are 3 reasons why informative speeches explain difficult concepts
  • Language or concept is difficult
  • Structures or processes are hard to envision
  • Ideas are difficult to believe

Difficult Language

• Use elucidating explanations (an explanation that helps an audience understand the definition of a term and distinguish its essential characteristics from the associated characteristics that are only sometimes present in that which you are defining) with difficult vocabulary
• Dr. Katherine Rowan explains that elucidating explanations should have four parts to process
• Provide:
  • Common exemplar, or ideal example
  • The definition that explains the essentials characteristics of the concept
  • Several examples and non-examples
  • Opportunity to practice identifying examples and non-examples

Difficult to Picture

• Two ways something might be difficult to imagine
  • Challenging to get an overall impression of the phenomenon
  • Challenging to see the parts, processes, and interrelations of the phenomenon
• Use a quasi-scientific explanation (an explanation that helps the audience get an overall picture of a phenomenon and see relationships among the parts) in this case
  • Offer a graphic feature to help (e.g., diagram)
  • Provide clear explanation of how parts relate

Difficult to Believe

• Something concepts are counterintuitive
• Use a transformative explanation (explanations that help audience members transform their everyday ideas about how something works into a more scientifically accurate understanding of the phenomenon) in this case
  • Acknowledge lay theories of concept
  • Acknowledge why theories are plausible
  • Explain why their perspective is incorrect
  • Explain the new concept and why it’s effective

Strategies to Help Audience Understanding

• Use repetition
  • Expose your audience to the same idea multiple times in multiple ways
  • The audience is more likely to remember the info
  • Aids your audience in understanding important complicated material within your speech
  • Provide more than one example
  • Find creative and different ways to express the same idea to help the audience achieve understanding.
  • The more you repeat something, the greater the chance the audience will pick up on it.
• Provide rewards
  • Your audience will pay more attention to what you’re saying
  • Rewards can be:
  • Explicit (giving candy to members who can answer questions correctly) or
  • Implicit (telling the audience how they will benefit from the knowledge you’re sharing)
  • The reward lasts much longer for the audience.
  • Creating intrinsic rewards for listening to the speech assists the audience in investing time in paying attention to you.
  • When we invest time in something, it shows that we care about it.
• Show and tell
  • Vital role in helping audiences understand the material
  • Uses visual and verbal organizational cues to help the audience identify the most important concepts and how they relate to each other.
  • Examples of visual organization cues:
  • Putting keywords for each main point on a PowerPoint slide
  • Showing important definitions or quotations while you’re talking about them
  • Showing your audience diagrams or images that will help them visualize how the concepts are related
  • Giving your audience a paper handout that will help them follow along during your speech
  • Use matrixes or other diagrams to help the audience understand the connections between the concepts.
  • Examples of verbal organizational cues:
  • Signposts
  • Reviews
  • Previews that help draw the audience’s attention to important concepts and
    • Help the audience understand how ideas are related
• Build on what they already know
  • Connect the new information to something that the audience already knows.
  • Use an analogy or metaphor to show the similarities between something familiar and something new.
  • Connect your topic or info to something which they are already familiar with.
  • Helps the audience make the association themselves in terms they understand; info will be remembered.
• Use humor
  • Capture and keep the audience’s attention.
  • Be careful; make sure that your humor enhances their attention rather than distracts from it.
  • Humor must help them focus on the content and not you.
  • The use of idioms and terms you expect the audience will know can be easily understood by the audience.
• Check for understanding (periodically)
  • Ask your audience questions or provide examples
  • If not, adapt your speech by explaining the ideas in a slightly different way
  • Prepare a few different ways to explain the same point.

Delivering Information Dialogically

• Provide multiple examples
• Notice the audience’s nonverbal cues
• Achieve understanding, not agreement
• Ask clarifying questions
• Maintain interest throughout your speech
• Provide clear points and references