My Page. Writing Center. Contents Introduction. Purposes of Informative Speaking. Major Types of Informative Speeches. Strategies for Selecting a Topic. Learn More about an Unfamiliar Topic. Think about Previous Classes. You can do this through a dramatic contrast, before and after. But on December 7, , everything changed. Within six months, Bay area residents of Japanese ancestry were gone, transported to internment camps located hundreds of miles from the Pacific coast.
This strategy rests on the ability of the audience to visualize the two contrasting situations. You have alluded to two sets of images that are familiar to most college students, images that they can easily visualize. Once the audience imagination is engaged in visualization, they are likely to remember the speech. Your task of providing memorable imagery does not stop after the introduction. While maintaining an even-handed approach that does not seek to persuade, you must provide the audience with information about the circumstances that triggered the policy of internment, perhaps by describing the advice that was given to President Roosevelt by his top advisers.
You might depict the conditions faced by Japanese Americans during their internment by describing a typical day one of the camps.
To conclude your speech on a memorable note, you might name a notable individual—an actor, writer, or politician—who is a survivor of the internment. Such a strategy might feel unnatural to you. After all, this is not how you talk to your friends or participate in a classroom discussion. Remember, though, that public speaking is not the same as talking. It demands more of you. In a conversation, it might not be important to be memorable; your goal might merely be to maintain friendship. But in a speech, when you expect the audience to pay attention, you must make the speech memorable.
When thinking about your topic, it is always very important to keep your audience members center stage in your mind. For instance, if your speech is about air pollution, ask your audience to imagine feeling the burning of eyes and lungs caused by smog. If your speech is about Mark Twain, instead of simply saying that he was very famous during his lifetime, remind your audience that he was so prominent that their own great-grandparents likely knew of his work and had strong opinions about it.
Giving a human face to a topic helps the audience perceive it as interesting. If your topic is related to the Maasai rite of passage into manhood, the prevalence of drug addiction in a particular locale, the development of a professional filmmaker, or the treatment of a disease, putting a human face should not be difficult.
To do it, find a case study you can describe within the speech, referring to the human subject by name. This conveys to the audience that these processes happen to real people. Help Creative Commons. Creative Commons supports free culture from music to education.
Their licenses helped make this book available to you. Help a Public School. Previous Section. Table of Contents. Next Section. Discuss why speaking to inform is important. Identify strategies for making information clear and interesting to your speaking audience.
Why We Speak to Inform Informative speaking is a means for the delivery of knowledge. Making Information Clear and Interesting for the Audience A clear and interesting speech can make use of description, causal analysis, or categories. Adjust Complexity to the Audience If your speech is too complex or too simplistic, it will not hold the interest of your listeners.
Avoid Unnecessary Jargon If you decide to give an informative speech on a highly specialized topic, limit how much technical language or jargon you use. Create Concrete Images As a college student, you have had a significant amount of exposure to abstract A term that is imprecise, leaving the meaning open to interpretation. Keep Information Limited When you developed your speech, you carefully narrowed your topic in order to keep information limited yet complete and coherent.
Link Current Knowledge to New Knowledge Certain sets of knowledge are common to many people in your classroom audience.
Exposition means a public exhibition or display, often expressing a complex topic in a way that makes the relationships and content clear. The goal is to communicate the topic and content to your audience in ways that illustrate, explain, and reinforce the overall content to make your topic more accessible to the audience.
The audience wants to learn about your topic and may have some knowledge on it as you do. It is your responsibility to consider ways to display the information effectively. Interpretation involves adapting the information to communicate a message, perspective, or agenda. Your insights and attitudes will guide your selection of material, what you focus on, and what you delete choosing what not to present to the audience. Your interpretation will involve personal bias. Bias is an unreasoned or not-well-thought-out judgment.
Bias involves beliefs or ideas held on the basis of conviction rather than current evidence. Which is the better, cheapest, most expensive, or the middle-priced product? We take mental shortcuts all day long, but in our speech to inform, we have to be careful not to reinforce bias.
Clearly no one can be completely objective and remove themselves from their own perceptual process. Failure to do so will result in a shallow speech. Here are a few ways to narrow the purpose:. There are many ways to approach any of these and other topics, but again, you must emphasize an important dimension of the event. Otherwise, you run the risk of producing a time line in which the main point gets lost.
In a speech about an event, you may use a chronological order Time order; the order in which events take place. The following is an example:. Specific Purpose: To inform the audience about the purpose of the Iditarod dogsled race.
Central Idea: The annual Iditarod commemorates the heroism of Balto, the sled dog that led a dog team carrying medicine miles to save Nome from an outbreak of diphtheria. Main Points:. In this example, you must explain the event. However, another way to approach the same event would describe it. By now you can see that there are various ways to approach a topic while avoiding an uninspiring time line. In the example of the Iditarod race, you could alternatively frame it as an Alaskan tourism topic, or you could emphasize the enormous staff involved in first aid, search and rescue, dog care, trail maintenance, event coordination, financial management, and registration.
Concepts are abstract ideas that exist independent of whether they are observed or practiced, such as the example of social equality that follows. Concepts can include hypotheses and theories. Here are a few examples of specific purposes developed from the examples:. Here is one possible example of a way to develop one of these topics:. Specific Purpose: To explain why people in all cultures are ethnocentric. Central Idea: There are benefits to being ethnocentric. In an example of a concept about which people disagree, you must represent multiple and conflicting views as fully and fairly as possible.
For instance:. Specific Purpose: To expose the audience to three different views of the American Dream. Central Idea: The American Dream is a shared dream, an impossible dream, or a dangerous dream, depending on the perspective of the individual. If your speech topic is a process, your goal should be to help your audience understand it, or be able to perform it. In either instance, processes involve a predictable series of changes, phases, or steps.
For some topics, you will need presentation aids in order to make your meaning clear to your listeners. For instance, if your topic is evaluating consumer credit, instead of just describing a comparison between two different interest rates applied to the same original amount of debt, it would be helpful to show a graph of the difference.
This might also be the sort of topic that would strongly serve the needs of your audience before they find themselves in trouble. Since this will be an informative speech, you must resist the impulse to tell your listeners that one form of borrowing is good and another is bad; you must simply show them the difference in numbers.
They can reach their own conclusions. Organizing your facts is crucially important when discussing a process. Every stage of a process must be clear and understandable. For example, as plaque is accumulating in the brain, the patient is likely to begin exhibiting various symptoms. Specific Purpose: To inform the audience about how to build an academic portfolio. Central Idea: A portfolio represents you and emphasizes your best skills.
In a speech about the process of building a portfolio, there will be many smaller steps to include within each of the main points. For instance, creating separate sections of the portfolio for different types of creative activities, writing a table of contents, labeling and dating your samples, making your samples look attractive and professional, and other steps should be inserted where it makes the most sense, in the most organized places, in order to give your audience the most coherent understanding possible.
For instance, the eruption of Mt. If you approach the eruption as an event, most of the information you include will focus on human responses and the consequences on humans and the landscape. If you approach the eruption as a process, you will be using visual aids and explanations to describe geological changes before and during the eruption. You might also approach this topic from the viewpoint of a person whose life was affected by the eruption.
This should remind you that there are many ways to approach most topics, and because of that, your narrowing choices and your purpose will be the important foundation determining the structure of your informative speech. One issue to consider when preparing an informative speech is how best to present the information to enhance audience learning. Katherine Rowan suggests focusing on areas where your audience may experience confusion and using the likely sources of confusion as a guide for developing the content of your speech.
Rowan identifies three sources of audience confusion: difficult concepts or language, difficult-to-envision structures or processes, and ideas that are difficult to understand because they are hard to believe. Rowan, K. A new pedagogy for explanatory public speaking: Why arrangement should not substitute for invention. Communication Education, 44 , — The following subsections will discuss each of these and will provide strategies for dealing with each of these sources of confusion.
Sometimes audiences may have difficulty understanding information because of the concepts or language used. If an audience is likely to experience confusion over a basic concept or term, Rowan suggests using an elucidating explanation composed of four parts. The purpose of such an explanation is to clarify the meaning and use of the concept by focusing on essential features of the concept.
The first part of an elucidating explanation is to provide a typical exemplar, or example that includes all the central features of the concept. If you are talking about what is fruit, an apple or orange would be a typical exemplar.
The second step Rowan suggests is to follow up the typical exemplar with a definition. Fruits might be defined as edible plant structures that contain the seeds of the plant. After providing a definition, you can move on to the third part of the elucidating explanation: providing a variety of examples and nonexamples. Here is where you might include less typical examples of fruit, such as avocados, squash, or tomatoes, and foods, such as rhubarb, which is often treated as a fruit but is not by definition.
Fourth, Rowan suggests concluding by having the audience practice distinguishing examples from nonexamples. In this way, the audience leaves the speech with a clear understanding of the concept. A second source of audience difficulty in understanding, according to Rowan, is a process or structure that is complex and difficult to envision. The blood circulation system in the body might be an example of a difficult-to-envision process.
To address this type of audience confusion, Rowan suggests a quasi-scientific explanation, which starts by giving a big-picture perspective on the process. Presentation aids or analogies might be helpful in giving an overview of the process. For the circulatory system, you could show a video or diagram of the entire system or make an analogy to a pump. Then you can move to explaining relationships among the components of the process. This often happens when people have implicit, but erroneous, theories about how the world works.
In such a case, Rowan suggests using a transformative explanation. Then you move to showing how the implicit theory is limited and conclude by presenting the accepted explanation and why that explanation is better. In the case of scientists disproving theories, you might start by talking about what science has proven e.
Honesty and credibility must undergird your presentation; otherwise, they betray the trust of your listeners. Therefore, if you choose a topic that turns out to be too difficult, you must decide what will serve the needs and interests of the audience. Shortcuts and oversimplifications are not the answer. Being ethical often involves a surprising amount of work.
In the case of choosing too ambitious a topic, you have some choices:. Your goal is to serve the interests and needs of your audience, whoever they are and whether you believe they already know something about your topic. Imagine that you have somehow learned a way of bypassing a security system located in many banks. The information you have addresses not only access to the bank itself but also the computers used in the storage of information and the transmission of funds.
You are certain that you understand the process well enough to successfully do it. Can you use this as your topic for an informative speech? Explain your answer fully. You intend to describe the long wait, the need for an insurance card, and the many personal details that the patient must give orally to the emergency department receptionist, who sits on the other side of a glass barrier typing the information into a computer.
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