When organizing your speech, you want to start with the body. It is difficult to introduce and preview something that you haven’t yet developed. A well-structured speech includes an introduction, a body, and a conclusion.
Organizing the Body of Your Speech
Writing the body of your speech takes the most time in the speech-writing process. Your specific purpose and thesis statements will guide the initial development of the body. You will determine main points that help achieve your purpose and match your thesis and then fill information into your main points by incorporating the various types of supporting material discussed previously.
Before you move on to your introduction and conclusion, you will connect the main points together with transitions and other signposts.
Determining Your Main Points
Each main point have a central idea that meets part of your specific purpose and include supporting material from research that relates to your thesis.
Reviewing your thesis and specific purpose statements guides you to suitable research materials.
In your research review, highlight key ideas that stick out to you as useful, effective, relevant, and interesting as they are likely to become the central ideas of your of your speech.
Support your thesis to meet the expectations of your audience especially if you are invited to talk about a specific topic.
Use parallel wording which is similar wording among key organizing signposts and main points that helps structure a speech though should you feel free to vary the wording a little more in your actual speech delivery.
Using parallel wording in your central ideas of each main point will help you write parallel key signposts like the preview statement in the introduction, transitions between main points and the review statement in the conclusion.
After distilling your research materials , you end up having several central ideas. You are likely have two to five main points depending on target audience. some ideas may become sub points and some may be discarded.
Organizing Your Main Points
After your central ideas are drafted, you consider how you may organize them so that you can determine what will be in the body of the speech.
several techniques of organizing your main points may includes:
Topical Pattern
This is where you are break a large idea into smaller ideas or subcategories such that there is a logical divisions the whole ides.people tend to like groups of three.
The topical pattern breaks a topic down into logical divisions but doesn’t necessarily offer any guidance in ordering them. You may want to consider the primacy or recency effect.
Primary effect is where you present your best information first in order to make a positive impression and engage your audience early in your speech.
Recency effect is based on the idea that an audience will best remember the information they heard most recently. It is useful when you want to include your best information last in your speech to leave a strong final impression.
Consider your topic and your audience to help determine which would work best for your speech.
Chronological Pattern
It helps structure your speech based on time or sequence. This is where you may trace development of an idea, product or event.
Ordering a speech based on sequence is also chronological and can be useful when providing directions on how to do something or how a process works.
The chronological pattern is often a good choice for speeches related to history or demonstration speeches.
Spatial Pattern
arranges main points based on their layout or proximity to each other. For example talk after tax deductions after talking about gross income in if you are explaining terms used in business.
Problem-Solution Pattern
Involves presenting a problem and offering a solution particularly useful for persuasive speaking—specifically those focused on a current societal issue. This can also be coupled with a call to action asking an audience to take specific steps to implement a solution offered.
You show a problem exists in one main point and then offer a specific solution in the second main point. To be more comprehensive, you could set up the problem, review multiple solutions that have been proposed and then add a third main point that argues for a specific solution out of the ones reviewed in the second main point.
Cause-Effect Pattern
This where one sets up a relationship between ideas that shows a progression from origin to result or start with the current situation and trace back to the root causes.
can be used for informative or persuasive speeches.
If used for informing, the speaker explains an established relationship citing evidence to support the claim.
When organizing an informative speech using the cause-effect pattern, be careful not to advocate for a particular course of action.
Monroe’s Motivated Sequence
It is a five-step organization pattern that attempts to persuade an audience by making a topic relevant using positive or negative motivation or both and including a call to action. The five steps are
1. Attention
Accomplished in the introduction to your speech which aims at getting attention of the audience.
2. Need
After getting the audience’s attention you will want to establish that there is a need for your topic to be addressed. You want to cite credible research pointing out the seriousness of an issue at hand. It can be helpful to use supporting material that is relevant and proxemic to the audience.
3. Satisfaction
This is where you present a solution to the problem. You may propose your own solution if it is informed by research and reasonable facts.
4. visualization
Includes positive or negative motivation as a way to support the relationship you have set up between the need and your proposal to satisfy the need. As an example you may ask your audience to visualize a world where things are better because they took your advice and addressed this problem.
5. Action.
Includes a call to action which include concrete and specific steps an audience can take. Your goal should be to facilitate the call to action making it easy for the audience to complete.
Incorporating Supporting Material
You can place the central ideas that fit your organizational pattern at the beginning of each main point and then plug supporting material in as sub points.
Each piece of supporting material you include eventually links back to the specific purpose and thesis statement. This approach to supporting your speech is systematic and organized and helps ensure that your content fits together logically and that your main points are clearly supported and balanced.
One of the key elements of academic and professional public speaking is verbally citing your supporting materials so your audience can evaluate your credibility and the credibility of your sources.
Much of the supporting material you incorporate into your speech comes directly from your research.
you should include citation information in three places:
- verbally in your speech
- on any paper or electronic information (outline, PowerPoint) and
- on a separate reference sheet.
As you paraphrase or quote your supporting material, work the citation information into the sentences.
Do not clump the information together at the end of a sentence, or try to cite more than one source at the end of a paragraph or main point.
It’s important that the audience hear the citations as you use the respective information so it’s clear which supporting material matches up with which source.
Writing key bibliographic information into your speech will help ensure that you remember to verbally cite your sources and that your citations will be more natural and flowing and less likely to result in fluency hiccups.
At minimum, you should include the author, date, and source in a verbal citation.
When citing a magazine, newspaper or journal article, it is more important to include the source name than the title of the article since the source name is what the audience needs to evaluate the speaker’s credibility. For a book, make sure to cite the title and indicate that the source is a book.
When verbally citing information retrieved from a website, It is more relevant to report the sponsor/author of the site and the title of the web page, or section of the website where information was taken from.
For an interview, state the interviewee’s name, their credentials, and when the interview took place.
Signposts
Signposts speeches are statements that help audience members navigate the turns of your speech. There are several key signposts in your speech. While the preview and review statements are in the introduction and conclusion respectively, the other signposts are all transitions that help move between sections of your speech.
Organizing signposts like First, Second, and Third can be used within a main point to help speaker and audience move through information.
Related topics
- The art of public speaking
- Speech making process
- Listening Skills
- levels of listening
- The art of listening
- Non-verbal communication
- persuasive communication
- What is communication
- Communication Theory