Informative Speech Outline

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Differentiate topic, purpose, and thesis statement

• Analyze topic selection from the perspective of the audience, the speaker, and the occasion

• Construct specific speech topics from general topic areas

• Compose general and specific purposes for your speeches

• Draft thesis statements

CHAPTER OUTLINE

•  Introduction: Picking a Topic and Defining Your Purpose

•  A Strategy for Picking a Topic

•  Finding a Topic Among Your Interests

•  How to Focus Your Topic for Your Audience

•  Speaking Purposes and Speaking Situations

•  The Thesis Statement: Putting Your Topic and Purpose into Words

 

Adam has been thinking a lot about a concept he learned in another course—cyberbullying. It seems important to him, and relevant to his friends' experiences. But would it make a good speech topic? What makes a good speech topic anyway? Is a topic good because everyone already knows about it—or because they don't? Should it be interesting to the speaker—or to the audience? Adam has to figure out if the topic of cyberbullying is going to work for his speech class.

Overview

One of the most important choices in composing and delivering any speech is the topic you would like to talk about. But choosing a subject is not all there is to it. An effective public speech requires that you decide what you would like to achieve by presenting your topic in front of a specific audience, the purpose for your speech. These two elements, your topic and your purpose, are the starting point for your relationship with the audience and for the choices you'll have to make to best achieve your goals in the speech. In this chapter we'll cover strategies for finding a topic and coordinating it with the purpose of the speech, whether to inform, to persuade, or to mark a special occasion. If you understand your speech as a part of an ongoing public conversation, picking a topic and a purpose can be both straightforward and rewarding as long as you consider your interests, the interests of the audience, and the demands of the specific speaking situation. Finally, we will discuss how to craft a thesis statement that captures the essence of your speech.

MindTap®

Start with a warm-up activity about Adam's speech, and review the chapter's Learning Objectives.

INTRODUCTION: PICKING A TOPIC AND DEFINING YOUR PURPOSE

A public speech is built out of specific choices. Some choices are small—the merits of one word versus another. Other choices are bigger, including how you will organize your speech and decide the best way to make your overarching argument. But the first choice you have to make is what to talk about, your  topic  All of your other choices in composing and delivering a speech flow from this primary choice.

MindTap®

Read, highlight, and take notes online.

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topic The subject of a speech focused to fit the audience, the purpose, and the situation.

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The strategy for picking a topic that we lay out in this chapter consists of two basic choices. The first choice is selecting a topic that works for you, your audience, and the specific occasion. The second choice is deciding how to narrow that topic to a specific purpose and create a thesis statement reflecting that topic and purpose.

A STRATEGY FOR PICKING A TOPIC

Picking a topic may be easy if you're intensely interested in one or more issues. In that case, your challenge may be to decide which topic to pick. Other times, you may not know exactly what you would like to talk about. In both cases, the advice is the same: You need a strategy for topic selection. An effective topic choice requires a bit more work than just deciding on a whim that you would like to talk about a topic currently of interest to you, or surrender to the idea that you find the least boring.

Picking a topic requires that you coordinate three important considerations, drawing on some of the concepts about audience that we introduced in Chapter 3—in particular, the ideas of audience, public, and adaptation. A good speaker understands the audience in relation to a public, which defines a set of interests, and then adapts the speech to those interests. The three considerations for selecting a topic are your interests, the interests and needs of the audience, and the nature of the occasion or speaking situation.

1. Your interests: Decide what is important to you. What do you spend your time thinking about? What are you passionate about, or at least interested in talking about and researching?

2. Your audience's needs and interests: What do you imagine would interest your audience about a given topic? What does your audience need to hear about the topic, and what information or persuasive claims would be useful?When James Franco is speaking at his own roast, how much freedom does he have in choosing a topic?FIGURE 5.1 The Three Considerations in Topic Choice

3. The specific occasion or speaking situation: What is the occasion for the speech? Why is the audience gathered to listen to you, and what kinds of content and style do you think is expected of you?

These three considerations can provide a rubric for choosing a topic, and they will remain helpful as you move to defining the purpose of your speech.

The best topics are found where your interests, the interests and needs of the audience, and the demands of the occasion overlap (see Figure 5.1). If you ignore any of these three considerations, the quality of your speech may suffer. For example, if you're talking about something that your audience is interested in and is appropriate for the occasion but you're uninterested in the topic, you're unlikely to speak with energy and conviction, and you're unlikely to be motivated to do the work of researching and composing an effective speech. If you're talking about something that interests you (suppose you like to talk about term versus permanent life insurance) and is appropriate for the occasion (an informative speech) but is uninteresting to your audience, you are unlikely to keep your audience for very long. Finally, if you're talking about something that is of interest to you and your audience (“Is dubstep annoying or awesome?”) but that is not appropriate to the occasion, you are unlikely to give a successful speech.

MindTap®

Watch the video, and do an interactive activity.

What Interests You?

The first consideration is what topics interest you. If a list doesn't immediately jump to mind, you might think about markers of your interest. What kinds of TV programs and movies tend to draw your attention? Can you recognize any consistent themes? When you read or browse the Web, what are the usual subjects? Do you have hobbies or activities at work or outside of the classroom that you would like to share with an audience? Even seemingly small interests can make an interesting speech topic.

Say, for example, that you are one of the millions who really like cooking and cooking shows. You don't have to give an informative speech on how to cook a perfect egg to make use of this interest. You could take up issues of good nutrition or trends in food and eating. You could talk about the implications of agricultural subsidies, or you could make the case for eating locally. If you are careful and creative in thinking about your interests, you're likely to discover a range of potential topics that interest you. A little later in the chapter, we'll offer a number of ways to find a speech topic among your interests.

What Will Interest Your Audience?

You also should think about the interests and needs of your audience. Instead of asking yourself, “What am I going to do with this speech?” it's better to ask, “What are we going to do with this speech?” In earlier chapters, we've discussed public speaking as conversation, and here's just one way where that approach begins to pays off. When you've identified some topic areas of interest to you, ask yourself these questions about your audience:

• What would the audience be interested in, or could be convinced to be interested in, on the basis of the topic's impact on the audience as a group?

• What does your audience need to hear? What aspect of the general topic area should the audience be informed or persuaded about?

 

In other words, the more fully you are able to put yourself in your audience's shoes, the more effective your choice of topic and purpose will be.

In Chapter 3, we discussed audiences and speakers as participants in a larger public conversation. If you think about your audience as people who care about health, a whole set of topics comes to mind. If you think about your audience as people who care about jobs and careers, another set of topics comes to mind, and so on. The point is that you don't have to start with just yourself or some random topic; you can begin thinking about topic choice by thinking about the audience. In a few pages, we'll discuss in detail how to focus your topic to fit your audience's interests.

What Is the Occasion?

Will Allen of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, received a MacArthur Foundation Genius grant. Does that automatically make him an interesting topic?

Second, as you choose your topic, consider the occasion. Whether you are giving a sales presentation, endorsing a political candidate, requesting an exemption from a university regulation, or speaking to your public speaking class, the speaking situation may impose some constraints that can affect your topic selection. You need to talk about an issue that you can effectively fit within your time limit, and you need to talk about subject matter that is both accessible to and acceptable for an audience of your peers. Later in the chapter, we will discuss types of speaking situations.

Fitting with the occasion, when you consider the occasion, this also includes thinking about the moment. Two videos in the MindTap Speech Video library illustrate that point. In Why Laughter is the Best Medicine, Michael's enthusiasm about the topic is contagious. But he's also chosen a topic that will interest the audience, because everyone likes to laugh, and he's chosen an approach (“Hey, it's good for you”), which gives him a good reason to talk about it with the audience, so it fits his interests, his audience and the occasion. In Together We Can Stop Cyberbullying, the speaker has chosen a topic that he thinks is important and shows that by bringing his personal experience as a “tutor and mentor.” He also makes a great case to the audience members about why they should care about it, both intrinsically (he gives some disturbing examples) and because it might happen to any of us. It works well in the classroom context because he can discuss the problems and solutions in a 10-minute speech.

What Is Your Purpose?

Your purpose is another critical choice point. Your task is to figure out what topics can suit you and your audience simultaneously. Of course, at the most general level, your purpose is to give a good speech. Good speeches make a connection with the audience, advance the quality of collective conversation, and inform, persuade, or engage.

But these general goals are not specific enough to guide the choices that you need to make in composing a speech. So, to determine the  specific purpose  of your speech, take a look at where your interests and your audience's interests intersect. This intersection is in part your personal preference and in part the audience's need, which we discussed earlier. Your specific purpose is to fulfill a specific need for your audience as it relates to your topic.

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specific purpose The need that your topic can fill for your audience.

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For example, imagine that you want to take up the general topic of food, and you are convinced that locally produced food is better for you, your audience, and the environment. Your general topic (food) drives toward a specific purpose. In this case, you would like to inform your audience about the benefits of eating locally or to persuade them to change their eating habits to emphasize local foods. Of course, your specific purpose could go the other way too: You could try to convince your audience members that local foods are costly, more energy- and labor-intensive, and not that much better than foods coming from a distance. Either way, your specific purpose flows from your interests and your assessment of what your audience should do or think about your topic.

What Is Your Thesis?

Finally, you have to translate your topic and purpose into a thesis statement. A  thesis statement  is a one-sentence summary of the argument that you would like to make or the information you would like to present. This statement identifies your topic, embodies your goal, and sets the stage for all the elements in the speech that follow it. Actually, a good thesis statement will help you compose an effective speech. As you are drafting it, you can ask, “Does this fact, piece of information, point, or argument support the thesis statement and help me to advance my case?”

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thesis statement A one-sentence summary of your topic and your goal.

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We will discuss thesis statements in more length toward the end of the chapter, but for now, think about thesis statements as being like short movie trailers, which give a succinct idea of what the movie is about. So for our local food example, in which the specific purpose is to convince the audience to eat locally, the thesis statement might be something like this:

FIGURE 5.2 The Process of Choosing a Topic

We should all emphasize local foods in our diets, because locally grown food tastes great and is better for the environment.

Notice that this statement identifies the general topic area (food) and the purpose (to get more people to eat more local food) and condenses this purpose into an argument by emphasizing the benefits of local eating for the audience. Overall, your goal in this process of choosing, focusing, and defining your topic is the best fit possible for your audience and the situation (see Figure 5.2).

So far, we've discussed how to pick a topic, define a purpose, and move toward a thesis. Next, we'll look in detail at ways to find and focus on your topic.

FINDING A TOPIC AMONG YOUR INTERESTS

As we've said, one place to start looking for a topic is your own knowledge and interests. Even if you want to begin with a certain public—people who are concerned about health or the environment or success or some other topic—you have to identify what publics you belong to or are important to you. You can start by asking yourself what you already know and what you want to know.

What Do You Already Know or Care About?

On what subjects are you expert? Does the answer tell you something about the publics of which you are a part? Everybody has many kinds of expertise, whether they realize it or not. You've done many things in your life so far, and these things have given you knowledge that others may not have. Maybe you play one or more sports or a musical instrument, or maybe you're an expert gamer. Perhaps you've had jobs or internships that gave you interesting insights or knowledge. Your major classes obviously define a kind of expertise, as does any course where you mastered the material because it moved you. Reflecting on any of these experiences might help you choose a topic area that's meaningful and relevant to you and that you can make interesting for your audience.

As mentioned earlier, be sure to consider your audience as well as yourself when you are reflecting on possible topics. For instance, referring to our example of a speech about the drinking age in Chapter 2, people who are old enough to drink have an interest in this topic that is very different from those who are still under age. Similarly, some college students feel that alcohol is an important part of their life, and it's something they care about; however, others have little interest in alcohol or other people's alcohol consumption.

How did Angelina Jolie end up choosing refugees as her “cause,” and the subject of frequent speeches?

What Do You Want to Know More About?

Another great way to explore possible topics is to think about what you wish you knew more about. A specific topic, say, cloud computing or cancer vaccines, may have caught your imagination. Or you may have noticed a problem, such as a local source of pollution, or a campus group that you don't think has sufficient funding.

Often, we see items in the news or while surfing online that pique our interest. Not everything you find this way will work for a speech, but once you're in a public speaking class, it's worth keeping a little list you can go back to for ideas. Perhaps, for example, you'd like to know more about tuition, how it's set, why it goes up, or where your tuition dollars go.

FAQ  What if I don't want to know more about anything?

Everybody has some curiosity. You couldn't get through school if you didn't. But often people self-censor: When they think about the things that interest them, they immediately decide, “Oh, no, that wouldn't work.” So when you're brainstorming, be gentle with yourself. Write down everything that comes to mind, and evaluate it later.

Brainstorming

How does brainstorming work? William Duggan, a researcher at the Columbia Business School who studies entrepreneurship and strategic intuition, has an interesting approach to this topic. He argues that the ideas about brainstorming that many of us have are based on a picture of the brain that modern neuroscience has abandoned. Duggan argues that we should not see brainstorming as turning off our more rational or critical “right brains” to let our creative “left brains” run free. Instead, the human brain is always using both our rational and our creative faculties to weave together things from our history with old and new concepts in the context of new experiences. And the really innovative stuff in brainstorming happens in that magic movement between our experiences, our concepts, and the creative connections that we make between ideas and the world.

So, Duggan argues, the most effective kind of brainstorming is the kind we have suggested here: Start with some general concepts that inform a choice (in the case of picking a topic, we have suggested that you start with your interests and experience) and then break each of these general concepts into smaller components: Why is it that you are interested in the things that you are? If, say, you are interested in college sports, why are you interested in them? Why college sports and not pro sports? What is it about watching or following sports that keeps you interested? Or, in the case of your experiences, what is it about your experiences that you think might be relevant to another audience? Why? Are your experiences relevant because they create opportunities for others to learn and grow? To avoid mistakes? Do you have a unique perspective as a result of your experiences? Why is it unique?

In other words, you do not have to put pressure on yourself to think of wildly innovative or creative topic ideas that strike you like a bolt out of the blue. Instead, creativity comes from working through a process. The key to brainstorming (and to innovation generally, argues Duggan) is to begin with a rough or general instinct about a problem, and then to break down your initial instinct into smaller elements. In the process of breaking down larger ideas down into smaller parts, these smaller ideas can come together in new and unexpected ways. That is where creative ideas come from.

This view of the creative process fits exactly with the ancient rhetorical idea of invention, which is the word that ancient Roman rhetoricians used for the process of generating the content of a speech. Their word for invention did not mean “to create something from scratch”: it meant a kind of discovery, a guided search for ideas, which was primarily about figuring out what already existing concepts you could find and put together in new ways to craft a persuasive case.

 

For more information, see:

William Duggan, Creative Strategy: A Guide for Innovation (New York: Columbia University, 2012).

Brainstorming

Suppose you've thought about what you already know and what you'd like to know, and you're still drawing a blank. Don't give up. Brainstorm instead.

First, list everything you're interested in. Try to imagine all the things you would like to learn about if your time and money were unlimited. You could list anything from the moon and the stars, to how buildings are constructed, to the science of concrete, to how officials decide to site and time traffic lights, to what makes people smarter or stronger, or why college is important, or how Jon Stewart became so popular. Whatever it is, write it all down. Save this list.

Now, write down the major experiences of your life: home, family, school, travel, work, hobbies, places you've been (whether the hospital or Washington, DC), and things you've done (competed in sports, won an award, worked at a camp).

Next, go through both these lists and look for keywords or key phrases. These are words and phrases that come up more than once or that seem especially vivid to you.

Finally, go to a search engine (such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing), and enter some of your keywords or phrases. Comb through the hits and see what comes up. Is there something here that looks like a speech topic? You'll want to be patient doing this, because for any given search term, you'll get a huge number of hits.

You also can see how your term relates to other people by combining it with the words news or current events. Type in the words news blood donation and see what you get; the hits near the top are likely to be reports about research on blood, policies about donation, problems with shortages, and so on.

Cut and paste to a file the links that catch your eye. Do this for five or six of the terms on your brainstorm list, and you'll certainly have some excellent speech topics, ones that come from your own life and experiences.

Another option is to talk to a librarian at your school. If you talk to someone who deals with topics of all kinds on daily, you might get some very good additions to your brainstorming.

FINDING TOPICS CONNECTED TO YOUR PUBLICS TRY IT!

Brainstorm some topics that matter to you. If this seems a little too broad, you might begin by thinking about specific areas, using the “as” technique from Chapter 3. So what matters to you in a given role:

• As a student at the university—is there a service that the campus needs or a policy you'd like to see changed?

• As a member or future member of a professional community—what should your classmates know about your career, occupation, or business interests?

• As a consumer—what should or shouldn't people be buying? Do you know something about a product or a brand that would help your listeners make better choices?

• As a citizen of your city or state—what local policies or practices bother you? What are the actions that make you say, “If I were running things, this would be done differently!”?

• As an American—what federal policies or practices are working well and should be expanded? What issues should we be paying attention to that we are not?

• As a human being—there has to be something that you are passionate about that you would like to share with your audience. What is it?

 

Your answers to these questions indicate publics to which you belong, and to which your audience will belong as well.

Choosing One of Your Topic Ideas

Once you've generated some topic ideas, you'll have to think about how to choose one. Researching and presenting will be easier, and you'll be more effective, if you care about the topic. But if you're incredibly passionate about the subject, beware: It might not be the best choice because you may not be objective enough to take the audience's perspective, and you may give a speech aimed only at yourself.

You probably shouldn't play it too safe by picking something that's so well known or universally understood that it's boring. Instead, go for something that seems novel or represents a new angle about something familiar.

If you have only 5 to 10 minutes to speak, a topic that's too broad or too obscure won't work. If it would take 15 minutes to give the audience the background information to understand your point, you won't achieve your goals in a 10-minute speech.

Table 5.1 summarizes the advice on choosing a topic.

Table 5.1 Topic Choice Dos and Don'ts

Do	Don't
Brainstorm by listing all the things about which you already have an opinion.	Pick a topic you don't care about because it seems easy or feels safe, or you have already done all the research.
Pick a topic that interests you, preferably one that you care about.	Pick a topic on which you are so passionate you don't have any perspective.
Pick a topic that contains some element of controversy or that has an angle your audience may not expect.	Pick a topic that everyone already knows about.
Pick a topic about which you can explain to audience members why they should care.	Pick a topic so obscure or difficult that you won't be able to connect it to the audience in the time allotted.

HOW TO FOCUS YOUR TOPIC FOR YOUR AUDIENCE

Often, the topic area you've chosen will be too broad. It would be easy to talk about a topic area such as obesity or decriminalizing marijuana for an hour without scratching the surface, but you probably have only 5 to 10 minutes for your speech. You can't squeeze it all in, so you'll have to narrow your topic. Yet you also don't want to narrow your topic so much that you have nothing to talk about. Finding the happy middle is the key here. Your goal is to give a complete and self-contained speech in 5 or 10 minutes, not a small part of a larger speech.

How do you narrow your topic? You have to find a subtopic, a piece of the larger topic. You've already established your interest in and connection to the topic area, so you should focus it according to the audience's likely interests. You can play around with possibilities, considering different rhetorical audiences and different subtopics, trying to find the best fit.

As examples, let's return to the topics of obesity and decriminalizing marijuana and consider the potential rhetorical audiences that would allow us to narrow these topics.

Geography or Location

Sometimes you can narrow a topic by looking at it in terms of “our city,” “our state,” or “our campus.” Each location defines a particular rhetorical audience and public. For example, the epidemic of obesity strikes differently in different parts of the country, and the statistics differ significantly for urban and rural folks.

The criminality of marijuana also depends on state and local laws and their enforcement. Some are more tolerant than others, and in some, possession is already legal, so you might focus only on the local obstacles to and consequences of decriminalizing marijuana.

Audience members naturally will perceive a greater relevance for something that is happening, or could happen, nearby. If you are giving a persuasive speech, local actions are more likely to be meaningful to your listeners than those on a larger scale.

Past, Present, or Future

Some timeframes may be meaningful than others to a specific audience, so timeframes also can narrow the focus of your speech. Probably a student audience doesn't care much about the history of obesity, but they may care about the future. If current data project that 1 in 3 people will be obese by age 32, then in a class of 25, about 8 people are likely to become obese—and they might be anyone!

Table 5.2 Finding Your Topic Focus

Too Broad	Just Right	Too Narrow
Persuasive speech: We need better health care.	The federal government should adopt a single-payer insurance system.	Someone should give me better health insurance.
Informative speech: Recreational drugs are bad.	Methamphetamine use is dangerous.	That guy in the back row is always high.
Persuasive speech: People should care about stuff more.	College students should take a more active role in local elections.	You should come to the environmental interest group meeting tonight.

The history of drug laws, and how the use and possession of marijuana became a federal crime in the 1930s, is important in setting a context for current debates. The history also is fascinating on its own, because it's a common assumption that drugs always have been illegal when attitudes about drugs actually have changed radically in the past—so they could change again in the future.

Typical Audience Interests

You also might think about what interests are characteristic of your specific rhetorical audience. With regard to the topic of obesity, college-age students might worry about the “freshman 15” (a documented 15-pound weight gain that many college students experience) or about increasing numbers of their peers who are either obese or have conditions to which obesity contributes, such as diabetes. From another perspective, everybody at some point becomes a consumer of health care, and because the prevalence of obesity lowers the general health of the population, it tends to make everyone's care more expensive. Some students will be covered by their parents' health insurance, but one day everyone will be funding his or her own insurance or health care, so obesity matters even for people of average weight.

Some students may be interested in being able to use marijuana freely, but that won't be your whole audience, so framing your speech as if your whole audience were recreational drug users wouldn't be appropriate. However, if reducing costly drug prosecutions would free-up government money that could improve public schools and universities, it would serve the interest of every student.

Table 5.2 gives examples of extremely broad and narrow versions of topics (the left and right columns) and ones that would be just right for a classroom speech.

FAQ  What can I do to learn more about my audience in public speaking class?

If your classmates seem like strangers to you, it's much harder to know what topics will interest them. Taking advantage of class activities, such as group work or study groups, will allow you to get to know students in your class.

SPEAKING PURPOSES AND SPEAKING SITUATIONS

In ordinary conversations, you rarely have to think about your goals for some situation. If you're at a party, your goal might be to learn more about the person you're talking with and letting him or her learn about you. If you're interviewing for a job, you're sharing information in a way that highlights your skills and experience and demonstrates why you're right for the job. If you're shopping for a new TV, you'll probably go in with some questions and preferences, and you want the salesperson to tell you what you need to know to make a buying decision.

A public speaking situation requires consciously thinking about the situation and your purpose. Sometimes the situation determines the purpose. At a funeral, for instance, you should praise the person who has passed away. In other cases, you have more freedom to set your goal. If you're talking to a community group about the problems of tagging and graffiti, you might choose between being mainly informative or mostly persuasive.

General Purposes of Speeches

The  general purpose  of your speech is the kind of communication act you would like to accomplish with the audience. The way we think about speaking purposes today is based on a set of categories from the Roman rhetorician Cicero. Cicero identified three general purposes for speeches: docere, Latin for “to teach or inform”; movere, “to move or persuade”; and conciliare, “to engage with the audience.” (Sometimes the term delectare, “to delight, please, or entertain,” was used in Roman rhetoric to describe this purpose.)

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general purpose Type of communication act: information, persuasion, or engagement.

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With some changes, these categories still work well for us today. When you speak, your purpose can be to provide some new information to the audience, to move the members to some change in their thinking or behavior, or to comfort or inspire them. Here, in more familiar terms, are the three general purposes of speaking, which were introduced in Chapter 1:

1. Informing is your purpose when you are giving the audience members information that you think might be useful in their making decisions or understanding events in their lives. As we'll discuss in the next chapter, speaking to inform doesn't mean that you are just a passive conduit of information; as a speaker, you are choosing and shaping information in ways that will be most effective for your audience.

2. Persuading is your purpose when you are trying to change minds or actions of the audience. Persuasion requires you to appeal to the audience's trust, emotions, and reasoning.

3. Engagement is your purpose when the main point is the audience's engagement with the speech itself. The speech may be funny, sad, or inspiring, but even though it may convey information to audience members incidentally or help to change their minds, its primary purpose is to draw the audience into the experience.

Your specific purpose, discussed earlier, is the general purpose that has been tied to your topic and your audience. If the topic were “parking problems on campus,” the specific purpose could be “informing the audience about parking problems on campus,” “persuading the audience why parking is a problem on campus and how to solve that problem,” or “having some fun with the frustrations of the parking situation on campus.” Your purpose also is related to the occasion for your speech, your speaking situation.

Types of Speaking Situations

Outside of the public speaking classroom, the occasions that call for you to speak will often dictate what you are speaking about. You may be asked to give a pitch at a business meeting, to give a speech honoring someone, or to motivate your organization to adopt a specific policy or proposal. But in the classroom setting, you'll often have the chance to choose your topic. This is an important choice, one that demonstrates your understanding of your audience and your purpose.

 

The Classroom Situation In the classroom, first make sure you are clear about the assignment. Your syllabus will identify, for each graded speech you give, your goal or general purpose: Informing, persuading, and entertaining or commemorating are typical goals of classroom speeches.

But presenting a good speech doesn't mean just meeting the minimum requirements for the assignment. Speaking is communicating, and classroom communication is real, in many ways. Your speech will have real effects on your classmates. It may bore them, annoy them, inspire them, enlighten them, or confuse them. Which of these you want to do depends on your purpose. If you're just going through the motions, with no real goal, your speech probably won't be that good, and you won't be training yourself well for situations in which you do want to have a real impact.

 

Invited Speaking Situations An advantage of an invited speech is that you often have information about the situation and its constraints before you go in, which helpfully reduces some of your choices. A group often has a purpose and will make clear why it's invited you to talk. For example, if the international student association at your school asks you to talk about your experiences studying abroad, you have a pretty good idea of both the topic (studying in another country) and the purpose (sharing information and insights). If someone asks you to speak to a class or a group about a blood drive, you know you'll be talking about blood, the need for donations, and you'll be trying to persuade people to donate.

Being invited to speak can reduce the uncertainty about the purpose and expectations for the situation. But even though you've been invited, you still will have to work to win over audience members, who may not know exactly who you are or why you're there.

 

Public Situations In a public situation, it's likely that you'll be one of several speakers, and that a meeting has been convened for a specific purpose. In some cases, that purpose is to make a decision. At a school board meeting, for instance, members of the public will be allowed to each speak for a few minutes about a certain policy before the board votes. At a zoning hearing, citizens may get to speak about whether or not a specific business should be located in their neighborhood.

Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta, the first living soldier after the Vietnam War to be awarded the U.S. Medal of Honor, was invited to award a scholarship in his name at his own high school.

FAQ  What resources are available to me in brainstorming a topic of public relevance?

You can go to a number of places to figure out what topics are trending and might be interesting to your audience. Start by reading newspapers and news sites. You also might check out what topics are currently popular in web searches (for example, at Google.com/trends) or on social media sites (such as Twitter). You probably don't want to talk about specific stories you find there, but you might use these resources to discover examples for your speech or general trends that will interest your audience.

Before you speak in situations like these, you'll want to think carefully about how your contribution can make a difference in the final decision. Many times, speakers have only a short time at the microphone, and they produce a rapid-fire list of complaints and concerns. It often is more effective to state one solid argument that the governing body can use in making its decision.

Sometimes, public settings are forums or town halls. In these situations, speakers are encouraged to make short speeches in which they share their feelings or experiences. These settings often are more about getting all the available points of view and aren't well adapted to argument and dialogue. In such situations, your goal is to be vivid, memorable, and relevant. You want to say something that people will remember because it's relevant to the question at hand and because it reflects something personal about you.

TRY IT! PUBLIC COMMENT OPPORTUNITIES NEAR YOU

Do a little online research and list three occasions in your area that allow for public comment and encourage people to step up to the microphone. These occasions might be at your school, a city agency meeting, or a meeting of an organization. In which of these could you see yourself speaking? Why?

 

Business Settings Often, business speeches are either a presentation or a pitch. The presentation is a kind of informative speech that shares information, either to make sure that everyone is fully informed or to help managers with decision making. Presentation goals include clarity and relevance above all. You want to be sure that you are telling your coworkers exactly what they need to know, and they need to understand it clearly. In general, less is more in an informative presentation; presenting only the most relevant information will help you to avoid wasting everyone's time.

The pitch is something like a sales presentation, although what you are “selling” can be an idea, such as an advertising theme, or a service, such as your consulting or accounting expertise, or a product, such as your office collaboration software suite. The basic structure of a pitch is problem/solution (organizational patterns for such a speech are discussed in Chapter 7). The presenter describes a problem, then provides the idea, product, or service that solves the problem (you may have noticed that advertisements often take this form as well). To pitch your case effectively, you have to convince people not only that you understand their problem but also that your solution is the right one. An effective pitch requires a lot of background research to ensure that you fully understand your client's or coworkers' needs and interests.

Time Constraints

Time constraints are a given in almost all speaking situations. There is a simple rule here: The more time you have, the broader your topic, the more challenging your purpose, and the more ambitious your thesis statement can be. Alternatively, the shorter your time, the more disciplined you will have to be in choosing your topic and purpose. Of course, expanding the amount of time that you have does not necessarily mean that you should choose a larger topic, nor does it mean that you have to choose a more ambitious purpose or thesis statement. Nor does a short time mean you can't achieve important goals.

This rule is essential for speeches intended for the public speaking classroom. Sometimes, students can get hung up by not having enough to say to fill the allotted time. To guard against this problem, pick topics that are sufficiently fertile and purposes that are challenging enough to require the full speech time.

The more common problem with time constraints is topics and purposes that require more content than time allows. The following considerations can help you balance your topic selection with the allotted time:

• Does setting up the topic or the major issues surrounding it require a lot of explanation? For example, convincing people to eat more local food is a simpler topic than a detailed description of American agricultural and food policies.

• Is your intended topic so far out of the range of your audience's expertise or experience that you will have to spend significant time defining terms or explaining arguments?

• Does the topic translate easily into a compact thesis statement? If you are having a difficult time framing a thesis statement in one or two sentences, it may be a sign that the topic you have chosen requires too many different arguments and kinds of evidence to make your case elegantly.

• Are you overloading your topic and purpose with unnecessary arguments? The easiest test of this point is to sketch out the points that you would like to cover, and then to ask if each of them directly supports your thesis statement.

 

Choosing a topic will thus require you to balance several different factors: time limits, the size of the topic, and your goals.

THE THESIS STATEMENT: PUTTING YOUR TOPIC AND PURPOSE INTO WORDS

Once you have chosen a topic and a purpose appropriate for your time limit and audience, the next step is to combine the topic and purpose in a form that your audience will grasp easily: the thesis statement, a one-sentence summary of the topic and purpose together. The thesis statement ties together your narrowed topic and your purpose.

The thesis statement should come right after the first part of the introduction (which you'll see in Chapter 7 is called the “narration”) to let your audience know exactly what your speech is about.

If you have trouble formulating a thesis statement, go back and reconsider some of your choices:

• Did you do enough research?

• Have you included the audience?

• Does the thesis statement fit your general purpose?

 

Table 5.3 and Table 5.4 show thesis statements for informative and persuasive speeches about the two topic examples we've been using—obesity and the decriminalization of marijuana.

If you were giving an informative speech about obesity, you might present your thesis statement to your audience like this:

Table 5.3 Informative Thesis Statements

	Marijuana Speech (Informative)	Obesity Speech (Informative)
Topic:	Marijuana	The extent of obesity
Purpose:	To inform the audience about the history of marijuana	To show that obesity is widespread and to detail some causes
Thesis Statement:	In the next few minutes, we'll examine the history of marijuana as an illegal drug, from 100 years ago to the present.	In this speech, I would like to help you understand the extent of the obesity epidemic and some of its causes.

In this speech I would like to help you understand the extent of the obesity epidemic, and some of its causes.

Or this:

 

Today, I'm going to analyze the phrase “obesity epidemic,” explaining what obesity is and why it's an epidemic.

You don't have to say, “I'm going to inform you about obesity,” to make your purpose clear to the audience, though sometimes that is a useful way to construct your purpose and thesis statement.

If you were giving an informative speech about marijuana, you might present your thesis statement this way:

 

In the next few minutes, we'll examine the history of marijuana as an illegal drug, from a hundred years ago to the present.

This formulation also tells the audience that the organizational structure will be chronological (organized by time periods).

Another thesis statement for a speech about marijuana could be:

 

Today, I want to describe the positive and negative health effects of marijuana, for teens, adults, and for college students in particular.

This statement of purpose and thesis has the advantage of including a preview of the three points of the speech (teens, adults, and college students).

Table 5.4 Persuasive Thesis Statements

	Marijuana Speech (Persuasive)	Obesity Speech (Persuasive)
Topic:	Marijuana enforcement	The extent and harms of obesity
Purpose:	To persuade the audience that marijuana is not harmless	To convince people that obesity is a significant problem
Thesis Statement:	Today I'll present a significant amount of evidence why you shouldn't believe marijuana is a harmless drug.	I'd like to argue that obesity is directly, or indirectly, a problem for all Americans, including everyone in this room.

Muriel Bowser, Mayor of Washington DC, will preside over the District of Columbia joining four states in legalizing recreational marijuana use. How could you incorporate her into a speech about the legalization of pot?

A persuasive thesis statement on obesity might look like this:

 

I'd like to argue that obesity is directly or indirectly a problem for all Americans, including everyone in this room.

“I'm going to persuade you that obesity is a problem” is unlikely to be an effective thesis statement. Because it announces an outcome rather than an intention, the audience can take it as a challenge and mentally respond, “No, you're not!” and stop listening. It's better to state what you want to do, as in the following example, rather than your expected outcome.

 

Today I'll present a significant amount of evidence that proves you shouldn't believe marijuana is a harmless drug.

PRACTICING THESIS STATEMENTS TRY IT!

Pick two topics from your brainstorming list and turn each into a thesis statement (either persuasive or informative) that reflects your position on the topic. Check that the thesis is neither too broad nor too narrow, that it aims at an issue of common concern, and that there is a way of thinking or acting that would help or interest your audience. Would you like to hear a speech organized around this thesis? Do you expect that most of your audience members would?

Summary

Picking a topic can be a challenge, but only because it sometimes seems like you have to pull it out of thin air. The process of picking and refining a topic is easier if you follow a few simple steps and ask a few questions of yourself at each step in the process:

MindTap®

Reflect, personalize, and apply what you've learned.

1. Think about what topics matter to you or that you would like to know more about, and compare your list of interests to a list of topics that might matter to the audience. Brainstorming might help you generate these lists.

2. Define the situation: Where and to whom are you speaking? What is this audience interested in, or what should be important to the members that they might not know already? Focus your topic so it is appropriate to the time you have been given to prepare and speak.

3. Choose the general and specific purposes for your speech. Given the situation and your goals, what are you trying to accomplish with your audience?

4. Once you have a topic and general and specific purposes appropriate to your situation, create a thesis statement. Make sure the thesis is focused enough for you to do a credible job of supporting it but broad enough to be of sustained interest for you and your audience.

Picking a topic can seem daunting at first, but if you start with what interests you and think about what might interest your audience, you will likely find some good areas of overlap. If you work through each of these steps with some thought and intention, you will be well on the way to picking a topic that works for you and for your audience.

Questions for Review

 

1. What factors should you consider in choosing a topic? How do speaking situations, as described in the text, make a difference in your choice?

2. What are the best ways to narrow a topic? Give examples of overly broad and overly narrow topics.

3. What are the steps in the process of brainstorming?

4. What are the general purposes for speaking?

5. What are the speaking situations, and how do they differ from each other?

6. What is a thesis statement? What makes a thesis statement effective?

Questions for Discussion

 

1. What kinds of topics do you think are too difficult to talk about in public? Why?

2. What topics interest you? Do the topics have a common thread you would like to hear about? Do you think your potential audience shares any of these interests?

3. Can you make a topic interesting if the audience is not concerned about it already? How?

4. Pick a topic you've heard about in the news that really bores you. What would it take for you to become interested? Do a little online research and see whether you can come up with three interesting angles on this topic.

Key Concepts

MindTap®

Practice defining the chapter's terms by using online flashcards.

general purpose

specific purpose

thesis statement

topic