Organizing and Outlining Your Speech

The way you organize your material will help the audience to better understand and retain the content you are delivering. It will also help them follow your train of thought, hence they will concentrate and engage with you as you present. But before we dive into that, what are the different types of speeches I will have to develop?

There are many types of speeches that people develop and present, including but not limited to, entertaining speech, informative speech, demonstrative speech, persuasive speech, motivational, debate speech, etc. In this course, we will focus on the two most relevant types of speeches to your personal, academic, and professional aspects of life as computer science students.

Let’s first check how the two types of speech differ, then review the content that should go into building each of them.

📺 Watch the video below to learn more about the two forms of speech.

Constructing the Body of Your Speech: The Main Points

1) Informative Speech

It is recommended that when developing the body of your informative speech, you should select and phrase the main points precisely and arrange them strategically. For example:

Specific purpose: To inform my audience about the importance of AI in everyday life.

Central idea: Developed as a high form of technology, AI is a powerful tool and offers a number of efficient, insightful, and personalized experiences to humans.

Main points:

  1. AI automates tasks, increasing efficiency.
  2. AI provides insights for informed decision-making.
  3. AI drives innovation and delivers personalized experiences.

These three main points are the core of the body of your speech and choosing them should be based on your purpose statement, so how should you support it? Helpful questions for creating the main points of your speech are ‘What’ and ‘How’? For example: Using technologies for everyday tasks helps with maintaining a good work-life balance. How is that possible? then you enlist the different ways by which that is true.

2) Persuasive Speech

Developing the body of a persuasive speech is not that different from developing that of an informative one. The difference is the question we ask, and that should be ‘why?’. If your thesis is ‘ we should not adopt technologies for everyday life usage’ then we need to answer the question of why shouldn’t we? and then you need to enlist three main points as an answer.

For example:

Specific Purpose: To persuade my audience that they should not adopt technology for everyday life tasks.

Central idea: People should reduce their usage of technology for everyday tasks because it impacts their reliability and activity status.

Main points:

  1. Technology can experience malfunctions and errors, leading to unreliable outcomes.
  2. Overreliance on technology can result in the deterioration of human skills, reducing their reliability in performing tasks manually.
  3. Technology lacks the nuanced judgment and adaptability of humans, potentially leading to unreliable decision-making in complex or unpredictable situations.

The number of main points you decide to focus on is up to you and your time for your speech. However, the more points you include, the harder it will be for your audience to sort them out.

Building the Introduction of a Speech

How to start a speech

📺 Watch the video below to learn more about how to start a speech. Please take notes of the different strategies as you watch the video.

Developing Your Introduction

Now that you have a better understanding of how you can start your speech, let’s work on how to develop each of the Introduction, Body, and Conclusion. We will start off with the Body and the main points that go into it, then the introduction and conclusion. There are good reasons for talking first about the body of the speech. The body is the longest and most important part. Also, you will usually prepare the body first. It is easier to create an effective introduction after you know exactly what you will say in the body. The process of organizing the body of a speech begins when you determine the main point.

📺 Watch the video below for the steps you should follow to develop your introduction.

Here are the tips from the video for developing your introduction:

  1. Attention-getting.

  2. Tell the audience what is their win from listening to you.

  3. Explicitly mention your thesis statement or your central idea.

  4. A brief preview or roadmap of what you will cover.

Building Your Conclusion

📺 The conclusion part is also important to finish on a good note. Watch the video below to learn about the different steps you can use to develop the conclusion of your speech.

Here are the tips from the video for developing your conclusion:

  1. Signal the end.

  2. Restate a key takeaway.

  3. Ask the audience to do the next step.

  4. The hook, or sharing one last story, statistic, or quote, building on your introduction section.