Notes on Informative Speaking Principles

Functions of Informative Speaking

• Provide Knowledge: Sharing facts to increase audience comprehension, awareness, or familiarity with a topic.
• Shape Perceptions: Directing attention to specific subjects to influence how an audience interprets experiences, values, and situations.
• Articulate Alternatives: Helping listeners understand specific features and differential options to make informed decisions.
• Survival and Evolution: Communicating essential cultural, technical, and safety-related information required for human development and existence.

Responsibilities of the Informative Speaker

• Objectivity: Presenting an unbiased, fair, and impartial view, focused on teaching rather than calling for a change in mind or action.
• Credibility ($Ethos$): Establishing authority through antecedent credibility (reputation prior to speaking) and consequent credibility (developed during the speech through accuracy and preparation).
• Knowledgeability: Utilizing up-to-date, reliable, and unbiased source citations to augment personal experience.
• Relevance: Establishing a motive for the audience to listen, often framed by the acronym $\text{WIIFM}$ (‑What’s in it for me?‑).

Primary Types of Informative Speeches

• Definitional Speeches: Explaining the meaning of concepts, theories, or philosophies that may be unfamiliar or abstract to the audience.
• Descriptive Speeches: Providing detailed, vivid word pictures of a person, animal, place, or object to help the audience visualize the subject.
• Explanatory Speeches (Briefings): Focusing on the ‑how‑ or ‑why‑ of events, customs, inventions, or policies to enhance deep understanding.
• Demonstration Speeches: Showing a chronological process or procedure so listeners can perform the task themselves.

Strategies for Speech Development

• Maintain Interest: Using attention-getters such as Intensity (extreme characteristics), Novelty (unusual ideas), Contrast (comparative differences), Activity (action words/movement), and Humor.
• Storytelling: Utilizing narratives, including natural reality (scientific facts), social reality (historic events), and ultimate reality (philosophical questions).
• Create Coherence: Organizing points logically, using simple language (e.g., saying ‑talkative‑ instead of ‑loquacious‑), and avoiding information overload by narrowing the topic.
• Enhance Retention:
  • Building in repetition through verbal restatement and nonverbal reinforcement.
  • Appealing to the $\text{VARK}$ Model: Visual ($V$), Aural ($A$), Read/Write ($R$), and Kinesthetic ($K$) learning styles.
  • Retention statistics: Hear only ($20\%$); See only ($30\%$); Hear and See ($50\%$); Participating ($80\%$); or using a handout ($85\%$).

Questions & Discussion

• Review Questions:
  • Identify types of informative speeches for specific personas ($\text{Stacy}$ the physician, $\text{Rick}$ the animal control officer, $\text{Akiko}$ in insurance sales).
  • Analysis of past experiences with speakers who lacked credibility and how they could improve.
  • Ranking and justifying the importance of a speaker being objective, credible, knowledgeable, and relevant.
  • Application of the five attention-getting techniques to a chosen speech topic.
  • Audience orientation questions regarding existing knowledge, cultural influences, and desired outcomes.