This chapter is adapted from Stand up, Speak out: The Practice and Ethics of Public Speaking, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Why is speaking to inform important?

Accuracy, Clarity, and Interest Are Key to Effective Speaking

A good informative speaker conveys accurate, clear, and interesting information to the audience and keeps them engaged in the topic. Achieving all three goals—accuracy, clarity, and interest—is the key to speaker effectiveness. If information is inaccurate, incomplete, or unclear, it will be useless to the audience. But, there is no topic about which you can possibly give complete information, therefore, we strongly recommend you carefully narrow your topic and purpose.

Accuracy

To be accurate, make sure that your information is current. Even if you know much about your topic or wrote a good paper on the topic in a high school course, verify your own accuracy and completeness. Most people understand that technology changes rapidly, so update your information often. The same applies to topics that on the surface seem to require less updating. For example, the American Civil War occurred 150 years ago, but contemporary research still offers new and emerging theories about the war’s causes and its long-term effects. So, even with a topic that seems to be unchanging, carefully check your information to confirm that it is accurate and current.

Clarity

For your listeners to benefit from your speech, convey your ideas in a fashion that your audience can understand. Your speech’s clarity relies on logical organization and understandable word choices. Do not assume that something that’s obvious to you will also be obvious to your audience. Formulate your work with the objective of being understood in all details, and rehearse your speech in front of peers who will tell you whether your speech’s information makes sense.

Interest

In addition to being accurate and clear, be interesting. Your listeners will benefit the most if they can give sustained attention to the speech, and this is unlikely to happen if they are bored. This often means don’t use some topics you know a lot about. Why? Suppose, for example, that you had a summer job as a veterinary assistant and learned a great deal about canine parasites. This topic might be very interesting to you, but how interesting will it be to others in your class? To make this topic interesting, find a way to connect it with the audience’s interests and curiosities. For instance, perhaps there are certain canine parasites that also pose risks to humans—this might be an interesting connection.

Why We Speak to Inform

Informative speaking is a means to deliver knowledge. In informative speaking, we avoid expressing opinions. This doesn’t mean you may not speak about controversial topics. However, if you do so, you must deliver a fair statement of each issue’s side in a debate. If your speech is about standardized educational testing, you must honestly represent both proponents’ and critics’ views. Do not take sides, and do not slant your explanation of the debate to influence your listeners’ opinion. You are simply and clearly defining the debate. If you watch the evening television news on a major network, such as ABC, CBS, or NBC, you will see newscasters who undoubtedly have personal opinions, but they are trained to avoid expressing those opinions through loaded words, gestures, facial expressions, or vocal tone. Like those newscasters, you are educating your listeners simply by informing them. Let them make up their own minds. This is probably the most important reason for informative speaking.

How to Make Information Clear and Interesting for the Audience

To present a clear and interesting speech, use descriptions, causal analysis, or categories. With description, use words to create a picture in your audience’s minds. Describe physical realities, social realities, emotional experiences, sequences, consequences, or contexts. For instance, describe the towns peoples’ mindset during the Salem, Massachusetts witch trials. Also, use causal analysis, which focuses on the connections between causes and consequences. For example, in speaking about health care costs, explain how a serious illness can put even a well-insured family into bankruptcy. Use categories to group things together. For instance, say that there are three investment categories for the future: liquid savings, avoiding debt, and acquiring properties that will increase in value.

How to Adjust a Complex Topic for the Audience

If your speech is too complex or too simplistic, it will not hold your listeners’ interest. How can you determine the right complexity level? Your audience analysis is one important way to do this. Do your listeners belong to a given age group, or are they more diverse? Did they all go to public schools in the United States, or are some international students? Are they all students majoring in communication studies, or is there a mixture of majors in your audience? The answers to these and other audience analysis questions will help you to gauge what they know and what they are curious about.

Never assume that just because your audience is made up of students, they all share your knowledge set. If you do, you might not make sense to everyone. If, for instance, you’re an intercultural communication student discussing multiple identities, the psychology students in your audience will most likely reject your message. Similarly, the word viral has very different meanings depending on whether it is used with respect to human disease, popular response to a website, or population theory. In using the word viral, you absolutely must explain specifically what you mean. Do not hurry to explain a term that is easily misinterpreted. Make certain your listeners know what you mean before continuing your speech. Stephen Lucas explains, “You cannot assume they will know what you mean. Rather, you must be sure to explain everything so thoroughly that they cannot help but understand” (Lucas, 2004). Define terms to help listeners understand them the way you mean them to. Give explanations that are consistent with your definitions, and show how those ideas apply to your speech topic. In this way, you avoid many misunderstandings.

Similarly, be very careful about assuming there is a topic that everybody knows. Suppose you’ve decided to present an informative speech on how the early New England colonists survived. You may have learned in elementary school that their survival was attributable, in part, to Squanto assisting them. Many listeners will know which states are in New England, but if there are international students in the audience, they will not. Clarify either by pointing out the region on a map or by stating that it’s the six states in the American northeast. Other knowledge gaps can still confound your speech’s effectiveness. For instance, who or what is Squanto? How are the settlers assisted? Only a few listeners are likely to know that Squanto is a Native American Indian who spoke English and that this greatly surprised the settlers when they landed. Because Squanto spoke English, he could advise settlers in survival strategies during that first harsh winter. If you neglect to provide that information, your speech will not be fully informative.

Another way to improve your delivery, is to practice your speech in front of a live audience of friends or classmates. Notice terms that confuse them and that you must define.

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. Loading a speech with specialized language has the potential to tax your listeners. It can be too difficult to translate your meanings, and if that happens, you will not effectively deliver information. Even if you define many technical terms, the audience may feel as if they are being bombarded with definitions instead of useful information. Don’t treat your speech as a crash course in an entire topic. If you must, introduce one specialized term and carefully define and explain it to the audience. Define it in words, and then use a concrete and relevant example to clarify the meaning.

Some topics by their very nature are too technical for a short speech. For example, in a five-minute speech, you would be foolish to try to inform your audience about what caused the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear emergency that occurred in Japan. Present other technical topics in audience-friendly ways that minimize using technical terms. For instance, in a speech about Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that buried the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, you can use the term “pyroclastic flow” as long as you take the time to either show or tell what it means.

Create Concrete Images

As a college student, you have been significantly exposed to abstract terms and have become comfortable using and hearing abstract ideas. However, abstract terms lend themselves to many interpretations. For instance, in the abstract, the term responsibility can mean many things, such as duty, task, authority, or blame. Because of the potential for misunderstanding, use a concrete word instead. For example, rather than saying, “Helen Worth was responsible for the project,” convey a clearer meaning by saying, “Helen Worth managed the project,” or “Helen Kimes completed the project,” or “Helen Worth was to blame for the failed project .”

To illustrate the differences between abstract and concrete language, let’s look at a few word pairs:

By using an abstract term in a sentence and then comparing the concrete, notice the more precise concrete term’s meaning. Precise terms are more clearly understood. In the last pair of terms, knowledgeable is listed as a concrete term, but it can also be considered an abstract term. Still, it’s likely to be much clearer and more precise than profound.

Limit Information

If you overload your audience with information, they will be unable to follow your narrative. When you developed your speech, you carefully narrowed your topic, limiting information to its most complete and coherent. If you carefully adhere to your own narrowing, you won’t go off on tangents or confuse your audience. Use definitions, descriptions, explanations, and examples you need to make your meanings clear, but don’t add tangential information merely because you find it interesting.

Link Current Knowledge to New Knowledge

Certain knowledge sets are common to many people in your classroom audience. For instance, most know what Wikipedia is. Many find it a useful and convenient information source about coursework-related topics. Because many Wikipedia entries are lengthy, greatly annotated, and followed by substantial authoritative source lists, many students use Wikipedia in writing papers to fulfill course requirements. This a current knowledge set that virtually every classroom listener is likely to know.

Because your listeners are already familiar with Wikipedia, you can link important new knowledge to their already-existing knowledge. Wikipedia is an open source, meaning that anyone can supplement, edit, correct, distort, or otherwise alter Wikipedia information. In addition to your listeners’ knowledge that Wikipedia provides much good information, they must now know that it isn’t authoritative. Some listeners may not enjoy hearing this message. So find a way to make it acceptable by showing what Wikipedia does well. For example, some Wikipedia entries contain many good references at the end. Most of which are likely to be authoritative, having been written by scholars. In searching for topic, information, a student can look up one or more of those references in full-text databases or in the library. In this way, Wikipedia can be helpful in steering a student toward the authoritative information they need. Explaining this to your audience will help them accept, rather than reject, the bad news about Wikipedia.

Make It Vividly Memorable

If you’ve already chosen a topic, found an interesting way to narrow it, developed presentation aids, and worked to maintain audience contact, your delivery is likely to be memorable. Now, turn to your content and find opportunities to make it appropriately vivid by using explanations, comparisons, examples, or language.

Let’s say that you’re preparing a speech on the United States’ interning Japanese American people from the San Francisco Bay area during World War II. Your goal is to paint a memorable image in your listeners’ minds. Do this through a dramatic before and after contrast. For example, say, “In 1941, the Bay area had a vibrant and productive Japanese American community: people went to work every day—they opened their shops, typed office reports, and taught classroom students, just as they had been doing for years. But on December 7, 1941, 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 audience’s ability to visualize the two contrasting situations. You have presented two image sets that are familiar to most college students—images that they can easily visualize. Once the audience’s imagination is visually engaged, they are more likely to remember the speech.

Providing memorable imagery does not stop after the introduction. While maintaining an even-handed approach that does not seek to persuade, provide the audience with information about the circumstances that triggered the internment policy, perhaps by describing the advice that was given to President Roosevelt by his top advisers. You might depict the conditions Japanese Americans faced during their internment by describing a typical day in camp. To conclude your speech on a memorable note, name a notable individual—an actor, writer, or politician—who is an internment survivor.

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’s prepared and formal. It demands more of you. In a conversation, it might not be important to be memorable; your goal might merely be to maintain a friendship. But in a speech, when you expect the audience to pay attention, you must make the speech memorable.

Make It Relevant and Useful

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 their eyes and lungs burning from smog. This is a strategy for making the topic more real to them, since it may happen to them often; and even if it hasn’t, it easily could. 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. In doing so, you’ve connected your topic to their own forebears.

Personalize Your Content

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 on it should not be difficult. Find a case study you can describe within the speech and refer to the human subject by name. This conveys to the audience that these processes happen to real people. Use a real case study, though—don’t make one up. Using a fictional character without letting your audience know that the example is hypothetical is a betrayal of the listener’s trust, and hence, is unethical.

What are some informative speech topics?

For some speakers, deciding on a topic is one of informative speaking’s most difficult parts. The following subsections discuss several topic categories to use for an informative presentation. Then, we discuss how to structure your speech to address potential audience difficulties in understanding your topic or information.

Objects

The term objects encompasses many topics that we don’t ordinarily consider to be things. It’s a category that includes people, institutions, places, substances, and inanimate things. The following are some of these topics:

• Mitochondria
• Dream catchers
• Sharks
• Hubble telescope
• Seattle’s Space Needle
• Malta
• Silicon chip
• Spruce Goose
• Medieval armor
• DDT insecticide
• Soy inks
• NAACP

You must narrow your object topic because, like any topic, you can’t say everything about it in a single speech. In most cases, there are choices about how to narrow the topic. Here are some specific purpose statements that reflect ways to narrow:

• To inform the audience about soy inks’ role in reducing toxic pollution.
• To inform the audience about the banned insecticide DDT’s current uses.
• To inform the audience about what we’ve learned from the Hubble telescope.
• To inform the audience about the NAACP’s role in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
• To describe the gigantic Spruce Goose’s significance—the wooden airplane that launched an airline.

These specific purposes reflect a narrow but interesting approach to each topic. They are precise, and show you how to maintain your focus on a narrow but deep knowledge set.

People

The people category applies both to specific individuals and also to roles. The following are some of these topics:

• Dalai Lamas
• Astronauts
• Tsar Nicholas II
• Modern midwives
• Mata Hari
• Catherine the Great
• Navajo code talkers
• Mahatma Gandhi
• Justice Thurgood Marshall
• Madame Curie
• Leopold Mozart
• Aristotle
• The Hemlock Society
• Sonia Sotomayor
• Jack the Ripper

There is much information about each example. To narrow the topic or to write a thesis statement, recognize that your speech is not a biography or time line of someone’s life. If you deliver a comprehensive report of your subject’s every important event and accomplishment, then nothing will seem any more important than anything else. To capture and hold your audience’s interest, narrow your focus on a feature, event, achievement, or secret about your human topic.

Here are some purpose statements that reflect ways to narrow:

• To inform the audience about the first US training program for the moon-landing astronauts.
• To inform the audience about how a young Dalai Lama is identified.
• To inform the audience about why Gandhi was regarded as a mahatma, or “great heart.”
• To inform the audience about modern midwives’ extensive scientific qualifications.

Because with any of these topics there’s simply too much to say, narrow your purpose statement, which will be a strong decision-making tool about what to include in your speech.

Events

An event can be something that occurred only once or that is repeated:

• Emmett Till’s murder.
• The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
• The Industrial Revolution.
• The smallpox vaccine’s discovery.
• The Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests.
• The Bay of Pigs.
• The Super Bowl.
• The Academy Awards.

Again, carefully narrow these topics to build a coherent speech. Otherwise, your information is too broad and your speech is shallow. Here are a few ways to narrow the purpose:

• To explain how Emmett Till’s murder helped energize the civil rights movement.
• To describe how the Industrial Revolution affected ordinary people’s lives.
• To inform the audience about the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race’s purpose.

There are many ways to approach these and other topics, but again, you must emphasize the event’s important dimension. Otherwise, you produce a time line in which the main point gets lost. In an event speech, you may use a chronological order, but if you do so, you can’t include every detail. The following is an example:

Specific Purpose: To inform the audience about the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race’s purpose.

Central Idea: The annual Iditarod commemorates the heroism of Balto, the sled dog that led a dog team carrying medicine 1,150 miles to save Nome, Alaska from a diphtheria outbreak.

Main Points:

1. 1. Diphtheria broke out in a remote Alaskan town.
   2. Sled dogs were the only transportation for getting medicine.
   3. The Iditarod Trail was long, rugged, and under siege of severe weather.
   4. Balto the dog knew where he was going, even when the musher did not.
   5. The annual race commemorates Balto’s heroism in saving the lives of Nome’s citizens.

In this example, you must explain the event. However, another way to approach the same event is to describe it. The following is an example:

Specific Purpose: To describe the annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

Central Idea: It’s a long and dangerous race.

Main Points:

1. 1. The 1,150-mile, ten- to seventeen-day race goes through wilderness with widely spaced checkpoints for rest, first aid, and getting fresh dogs.
   2. A musher, or dogsled driver, must be at least fourteen-years-old to endure the rigors of severe weather, exhaustion, and loneliness.
   3. A musher is responsible for his or her own food, food for twelve to sixteen dogs, and for making sure they don’t get lost.
   4. Reaching the end of the race without getting lost, even in last place, is considered honorable and heroic.
   5. The participation expense is greater than the prize awarded to the winner.

By now you can see that there are various ways to approach a topic while avoiding an uninspiring time line. In the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race’s example, alternatively frame it as an Alaskan tourism topic, or emphasize the enormous staff involved in first aid, search and rescue, dog care, trail maintenance, event coordination, financial management, and registration.

Concepts

Concepts are abstract ideas that can include hypotheses and theories or that exist independently of whether they are observed or practiced, for example, social equality.

• The glass ceiling
• Ethnocentrism
• Honor codes
• Autism
• Karma
• Wellness
• Fairness theory
• Bioethics
• The American Dream
• Social equality

Here are a few ways to narrow the purpose:

• To explain why people in all cultures are ethnocentric.
• To describe the Hindu concept of karma.
• To distinguish the differences between wellness and health concepts.
• To show the resources available in our local school system for children with autism.
• To explain three of Dr. Stephen Suranovic’s seven categories of fairness.

Here is an 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.

Main Points:

1. 1. Ethnocentrism is the idea that one’s own culture is superior to others.
   2. Ethnocentrism strongly contributes to positive group identity.
   3. Ethnocentrism facilitates coordinating social activities.
   4. Ethnocentrism contributes to the group’s sense of safety.
   5. Ethnocentrism becomes harmful when it creates barriers.

For 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 individual’s perspective.

Main Points:

1. 1. The American Dream concept describes a state of abundant well-being in which an honest and productive American can own a home; bring up a family; work at a permanent, well-paying job with benefits; and retire in security and leisure.
   2. Many capitalists support the social pattern of working hard to deserve and acquire the material comforts and security of a comfortable life.
   3. Many sociologists argue that the American Dream is far out of reach for the 40 percent of Americans at the bottom of the economic scale.
   4. Many environmentalists argue that the consumption patterns that accompany the American Dream have depleted resources and contributed to air, water, and soil pollution.

Processes

If your speech topic is a process, help your audience to understand it or to be able to perform it. In either instance, processes involve a predictable series of changes, phases, or steps.

• Soil erosion
• Cell division
• Physical therapy
• Volcanic eruption
• Paper recycling
• Consumer credit evaluations
• Scholarship money searches
• Navy Seal training
• Portfolio building
• The development of Alzheimer’s disease

For some process topics, use presentation aids to make your meaning clear to your listeners. Even in cases where you don’t absolutely need a presentation aid, it is useful. For instance, if your topic is evaluating consumer credit, instead of describing a comparison between two different interest rates applied to the same original debt amount, it is helpful to show a difference graph. Also, this topic can strongly serve your audiences’ needs before they find themselves in financial trouble. Since this will be an informative speech, resist the impulse to tell your listeners that one form of borrowing is good and another is bad; simply show them the difference in numbers. They can reach their own conclusions.

Organizing your facts is crucially important when discussing a process. Every process stage must be clear and understandable. When two or more things occur at the same time, as they might in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, make it clear that several things are occurring at once. For example, as plaque is accumulating in the brain, the patient is likely to begin exhibiting various symptoms.

Here’s an example of a process speech’s initial steps:

Specific Purpose: To inform the audience about how to build an academic portfolio.

Central Idea: A portfolio represents you and emphasizes your best skills.

Main Points:

1. A portfolio is an organized selection of the best examples of the skills you can offer an employer.
2. A portfolio should contain samples of a substantial body of written work, print and electronically published pieces, photography, and DVDs of your media productions.
3. A portfolio should be customized for each prospective employer.
4. The material in your portfolio should be consistent with the skills and experience in your résumé.

In a portfolio-building process speech, create smaller steps to include within each main point. For instance, create separate portfolio sections for different types of creative activities, write a table of contents, label and date your samples, make your samples look attractive and professional, and other steps. Insert these sections where it makes the most sense, in the most organized places, to give your audience the most coherent understanding possible.

You’ve probably noticed that some topics are appropriate in more than one category. For instance, the 1980 Mt. St. Helen’s eruption could be legitimately handled as an event or as a process. If you approach the eruption as an event, focus most information on human responses and the consequences on humans and the landscape. If you approach the eruption as a process, use visual aids and explanations to describe geological changes before, during, and after the eruption. You might also approach this topic from the personal viewpoint of someone whose life was affected by the eruption. There are many ways to approach most topics, and because of that, narrowing your choices and purpose is the important foundation that determines your informative speech’s structure.

How do I develop informative content?

Developing Your Topic for the Audience

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 use these likely confusion sources as a guide for developing your speech’s content. Rowan identifies three possible confusion sources: difficult concepts or language, difficult-to-envision structures or processes, and ideas that are difficult to understand because they are hard to believe (Rowan, 1995). The following subsections discuss each confusion source and provides strategies to deal with them.

Difficult Concepts or Language

Sometimes, audiences may have difficulty understanding information because of the concepts or language used. For example, they may not understand what the term organic food means or how it differs from all-natural foods. 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 explanation’s purpose is to clarify the meaning and concept by focusing on the concept’s essential features.

The first part of an elucidating explanation is to provide a typical example that includes the concept’s central features. If you are talking about what fruit is, an apple or orange would be a typical example.

The second step Rowan suggests is to follow up the typical example with a definition. Fruits might be defined as edible plant structures that contain the plant’s seeds.

After providing a definition, move on to the third part of the elucidating explanation: provide a variety of examples and nonexamples. Here, include less typical fruit examples, 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 clearly understanding the concepts.

Difficult-to-Envision Processes or Structures

A second audience confusion source, according to Rowan, is a process or structure that is complex and difficult to envision, such as the body’s blood circulation system. To address this, Rowan suggests a quasi-scientific explanation, which starts by giving the process’s big-picture perspective. Presentation aids or analogies are helpful in giving a process overview. For the body’s blood circulation system, show a video or diagram of the entire system, or make an analogy to a pump. Then, move to explaining relationships among the process’s components. Be sure when you explain relationships among components that you include transition and linking words like “leads to” and “because” so that your audience understands relationships between concepts. For example, remember the childhood song describing the body’s bones with lines such as, “the hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone; the thigh bone’s connected to the knee bone.” Making the connections between components helps the audience to remember and better understand the process.

Difficult to Understand because It’s Hard to Believe; and Ethics

A third audience confusion source, and perhaps the most difficult to address as a speaker, is an idea that’s difficult to understand because it’s hard to believe. This often happens when people have implicit, but erroneous, theories about how the world works. For example, the idea that science tries to disprove theories is difficult for some people to understand; after all, shouldn’t the purpose of science be to prove things? In such a case, Rowan suggests using a transformative explanation. A transformative explanation begins by discussing the audience’s implicit theory and showing why it is plausible. 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, start by talking about what science has proven—the causes of malaria, the usefulness of penicillin in treating infection—and why focusing on science as proof is a plausible way of thinking. Then, show how the science-as-proof theory is limited by providing examples of ideas that were accepted as proven but were later found to be false, such as the belief that diseases are caused by miasma, or bad air; or that bloodletting cures diseases by purging the body of bad humors. Then, conclude by showing how science is an enterprise designed to disprove theories and that all theories are accepted as tentative in light of existing knowledge.

Rowan’s framework is helpful because it keeps our focus on the informative speech’s most important element: increasing your audience’s topic understanding.

Being Ethical

Honesty and credibility must be the undergird to your presentation; otherwise, you betray your listeners’ trust. Therefore, if you choose a topic that turns out to be too difficult, you must decide what will serve your audience’s needs and interests. 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:

• Narrow your topic further.
• Narrow your topic in a different way.
• Reconsider your specific purpose.
• Start over with a new topic.

Your goal is to serve your audience’s interests and needs, whoever they are and whether you believe they already know something about your topic.

How do I add logos?

For informative speeches, focus on the rhetorical appeal, logos. The appeals as you recall are pathos, ethos, and logos. Logos is the logical appeal. An easy way to remember this is that logos starts with an “L” and so does logic. How can you use logos or appeal to logic inside your informative speech?

Ask yourself these questions to consider if you are using logos properly in your informative speech:

• Are you using statistics? If so, are you using them properly and making sure they are accurate?
• Are you stating facts that you have found through research, which are actually facts and not opinions?
• Are you explaining your ideas in a logical manner? Is your audience able to follow what you are saying?
• Are you using sound reasoning as you explain facts and statistics to your audience?
• Are you using definitions in the speech? If so, are they accurate?
• Are you thinking of the audience as a reasonable and logical group of individuals?
• Are you appealing to logic in your speech by using examples, statistics, facts, definitions, and explanations?
• Are you logically arranging and organizing ideas?
• Is your speech easy to understand? Will the audience understand your speech’s main points?

You must answer yes to most of these questions for any research-based and informative speech. And remember, do not forget to also add pathos and ethos to your speech as well.

References

University of Minnesota. (2011). Stand up, Speak out: The Practice and Ethics of Public Speaking. University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing. https://open.lib.umn.edu/publicspeaking/. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Media References

Fuller, A. (2021, Oct). Appeals-Highlighted [Image]. Online & eLearning Services, Salt Lake Community College.