Public Speaking Chapter Thirteen

Planning Your Strategy:

- Achieve your purpose primarily through informing
- Defining your specific purpose
o Decide what you want to achieve
o Asses how the audience and occasion create opportunities and constraints
o Define the specific purpose
o People don’t usually make major changes based on one speech
o Sometimes and audience must be persuaded before it can be informed
- Informing your audience
o Informative strategies assume that the main purpose of the speech is to share ideas
with the audience
o The speaker is expected to be clear, interesting, and accurate
o Informative speeches share information about objects, processes, events, and
concepts
o Informative speeches ask that the listeners understand a specific subject not that
they have specific beliefs or ideas
o Listeners understanding can be changed because they see something in a different
light
o Learning something new might stimulate listeners to take action
o The speaker does not actually call on the audience to take action, but it is not
surprising if the audience starts to notice more related to the topic after the speech
o Informative speeches come into to the public forum for two different reasons
§ Provide information on things that affect people generally
§ May enable the public to decide what to do about the matters
Informative Strategies: approaches to preparing a speech in which the overall goal is to share
ideas with an audience
- Clarifying the Informative Goal
o Information is essential if you are to induce the listeners about something new
o The purpose of creating positive or negative feelings relies heavily on both
informative and persuasive strategies, as well as on entertaining
o Providing new information or perspective
§ Sometimes a speaker’s objective is not merely to supply more details but
to update and revise the audience’s common knowledge
o Agenda setting
§ A speaker whose purpose is agenda setting wants to create awareness of a
subject that listeners did not know about or think about before, thus
putting it on the agenda of topics that warrant their concern
Agenda Setting: creating awareness about a subject that listeners did not know about or think
about before
o Creating positive or negative feeling
§ It borders on cliché to say that information gives people power, but it does
§ Providing information empowers listeners to feel better about their ability
to control their lives
§ If they lay out the costs and benefits of alternatives the speaker may help
listeners to form criteria for making a decision
 § By resolving a difficult question, people feel better both about the subject
and about themselves
Informative Strategies:
- Defining
o Something used to introduce a new or unexpected way of viewing the subject, so
that the speech can develop the details and implications of this new approach
o Definition is unnecessary when the meaning is clear cut
o At other times, definition is used to create a positive feeling
o Intelligent discussion is unlikely when the participants have different ideas of
what they are talking about
Defining: a strategy to clarify a term or concept that is vague or troublesome or to introduce a
new way of viewing the subject
- Reporting
o Reporting is journalism in the oral mode, it answers the question what happened
and usually does so in strict chronological order
o Reporting is best if the analysis of the audience, occasion, and purpose suggests
that you need to explain a complex event by identifying each of its components
o Reporting is primarily a means to provide new information or perspective, but it
can also contribute to other goals
o Selecting which items to include and which to leave out therefore involves the
speaker in making subjective judgements, these can influence what listeners think
about the topic
o Even reporting is not purely an informative strategy
Reporting: a strategy to relate what happened with little analysis or interpretation
- Describing
o The strategy of describing can help a speech and a novel
o Description achieves the purpose of creating positive or negative feeling
o A mental picture becomes vivid through its details
o Some clichés can be avoided by describing the situation instead of stating
something explicitly
Describing: a strategy in which a cumulation of details characterizes or evokes a mental image
of the subject
- Explaining
o Speakers sometimes want to share with an audience a deeper understanding of
events, people, policies, or processes
o Considers different views of what happened, to ask why or how it happened, or to
speculate about what it means or implies
o Speeches that explain events or people often begin to simplify and then build
toward greater complexity
o Speeches that explain processes generally start with complexity and move
towards simplification
o Speeches explaining a difficult concept should distinguish between its essential
meaning and other meanings that may be associated with it but that are less
central
- Demonstrating
 o Sometimes the goal is for the listeners to be able to do something themselves by
the end of the speech
o The speech provides new information, makes the subject less strange, and create a
positive feeling
o Ask the following questions…
§ Does the audience need to see the process?
§ Is there enough time available for the demonstration?
§ Are the steps clear, distinct, and in a proper order?
• Do not skip any important steps or duplicate steps
§ Are actions and verbal instructions coordinated together?
• Avoid long gaps in the speech
- Comparing
o Seeks to clarify for listeners the similarities and differences between the items
compared, can be used to make things seem more similar than imagined
o A comparison might heighten awareness of differences between things thought to
be alike
o Another use of the strategy of comparing is to decide in what category something
should be placed
o Comparing can provide listeners with a basis for making a choice
o Might increase public understanding by identifying the problem, describing the
proposed options, and determining the strengths and weaknesses of each
o The purpose is not to urge a choice, but to make the alternatives clear so the
listeners can form their own judgment
o Speakers often combine these with informative speeches
Encouraging Retention:
- The true test of learning is how much knowledge is retained
- Speakers want the audience to understand and remember what they said
- The longer the speech is the less people remember according to the forgetting curve
- This is the biggest constraint on the effectiveness of informative strategies
- The methods used to increase attention apply to retention as well
- Active listening helps increase retention
- Retention is strengthened through reinforcement
- Saying we instead of you during a speech shows that the speaker identifies with the
listeners
- Parallel wording makes it easier to remember ideas, vivid wording will keep a description
in the listeners mind, and simple sentences make it easy to listen to what is being said
Forgetting curve: a curve that displays the rate at which something learned is forgotten over
time
Reinforcement: a response by a speaker that rewards the listener to strengthen the listener’s
positive attitude toward the speech