Chapter 13
Preparing Your Speech
CHAPTER OUTCOMES
• Understand the five steps in speech preparation
• Learn how to select your speech topic
• Explore ideas for analyzing your audience and adapting your topic to them
• Explain how to develop a strategy for researching your speech
• Discover ways to conduct your research and evaluate your resources
CHAPTER OUTLINE
• Public speaking is the process of preparing and delivering a message to an audience to
achieve a specific purpose.
PREPARING YOUR SPEECH: FIVE STEPS
Think about the speeches you’ve heard during your lifetime. Some were probably very good,
keeping your interest and providing useful information. Some were probably not so good—
perhaps they were boring or forgettable or both. What’s the difference? Preparation. Public
1. Think about your audience and speech topic. Determine the purpose of your speech,
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2. Investigate resources to use in developing your presentation. This includes planning your
research strategy, conducting your research, and evaluating the resources you find.
3. Compose your presentation, outlining your ideas and planning any visual support.
4. Rehearse your presentation on your own and in front of others, inviting feedback for
5. Revise your presentation, adapting it based on the feedback you received while rehearsing.
You can further improve your speech content and delivery by being critically self-
reflective—honestly assessing your communication and considering ways to improve it.
• In this chapter, we are just going to focus on the first two steps; choosing your topic and
investigating resources.
CHOOSING YOUR SPEECH TOPIC
The first part of “Step 1: Think” is to identify why you are giving a speech and to choose a
speech topic. Although you will want a topic that is appropriate for the situation, you’ll also
IDENTIFYING YOUR GENERAL PURPOSE
• When preparing a speech, you should first determine your general purpose, which is your
reason for giving the presentation. Your general purpose may not always be straightforward,
but typically speeches have one of three purposes:
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1. To inform your audience. Informative speeches educate your audience about a topic,
describe an object, demonstrate how something works, or explain a concept.
3. To recognize or celebrate a special occasion. Special occasion speeches entertain,
celebrate, commemorate, or inspire. These include introducing someone at an event,
accepting or giving an award, commemorating an event or a person, or giving a toast.
CONSIDERING SPEECH TOPICS
• Once you know the general purpose of your speech, it’s time to choose your speech topic.
1. Reflecting on Your Interests and Experiences
○ Consider a topic about something that interests you.
▪ Consider a certain hobby, cause, or favorite subject.
2. Brainstorming
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○ This is a creative problem-solving strategy that involves coming up with as many ideas
as possible in a defined period of time and is similar to group brainstorming previously
discussed in Chapter 12.
○ Free writing is the most common approach and includes three basic steps:
a. Listing ideas by simply writing down all the ideas that come to mind, without
judging them, during the allotted time. The wilder the ideas are during the
3. Creating Concept Maps
○ Concept maps are drawings that show connections among related ideas; they help you
expand on one idea with more specific topics.
○ They help you narrow down a broad topic idea generated during brainstorming.
DECIDING ON YOUR TOPIC
• After you identify a possible topic, you would then ask yourself whether the topic could
serve as the basis for a successful speech. The answer could be yes if you
○ consider the topic personally or socially important.
○ are interested in and challenged by the topic.
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ANALYZING YOUR AUDIENCE
As you determine your speech topic, you should also consider how to adapt the topic to the
UNDERSTANDING YOUR AUDIENCE
• Audience analysis is a process of identifying important characteristics about audience
members and using this information to prepare a speech. Audience analysis fulfills three
purposes:
1. The more you analyze your audience, the better you can adapt your topic to their needs
and interests.
3. Audience analysis helps shape your nonverbal delivery and language style.
• To better understand your audience, you can explore several factors, including the
following:
○ Audience demographics can include an audience member’s age, sex, education level,
group memberships, socioeconomic status, family status, and cultural background.
Depending on your speech topic, some demographic characteristics of your audience will
be more relevant than others.
▪ Although it’s important to take your listeners’ demographic characteristics into
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○ Attitudes, beliefs, and values make up how we see ourselves, known as our self-
concept, which influences how individual audience members will respond to our
message.
▪ Remember that an attitude is an evaluation that makes a person respond favorably or
unfavorably toward an issue, a situation, or a person.
▪ A belief is a conviction regarding what is true and untrue.
▪ Values are strongly held beliefs that guide our behaviors and are also strongly shaped
by culture.
▪ By understanding your audience’s attitudes, beliefs, and values, you can better adapt
your speech topic to connect with them.
▪ If you are dealing with controversial social issues, you’ll need to demonstrate respect
for your audience’s attitudes, beliefs, and values regarding your topic, as these may
○ Audience knowledge is when you consider your listeners’ existing level of knowledge
about your speech topic. You can make educated guesses about how much your audience
already knows or what kind of information they need by reflecting on their demographics
and their attitudes, beliefs, and values.
▪ When possible, directly poll your audience while preparing your speech to gauge their
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addressing a captive audience, give listeners a reason to pay attention by explaining
early in the presentation how they’ll benefit from the information you’re providing.
DEVELOPING YOUR AUDIENCE ANALYSIS
• To develop your audience analysis, ask basic questions about your audience, and keep the
answers to those questions in mind while preparing your speech. Getting answers will help
you narrow your speech topic and determine what content to cover.
○ If you’re planning a classroom speech, you’ll want to make informal observations about
your listeners that include the areas that we just discussed. You’ve probably already
○ Analyzing a non-classroom audience is trickier. You can briefly interview the person
who asked you to make the presentation, to get his or her sense of the audience’s
demographics; their attitudes, beliefs, and values; and their existing knowledge. You may
also ask the person the following questions:
▪ What’s the purpose of the meeting or event?
▪ How many people will attend?
▪ Are they required to attend?
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WRITING YOUR SPECIFIC PURPOSE STATEMENT
• A specific purpose statement is one complete sentence summarizing the goal of your
speech. It indicates whether you intend to inform or persuade your audience, reflects a
narrowing of your speech topic, and is influenced by your audience analysis. You want to
complete your audience analysis before writing your specific purpose statement because
PLANNING YOUR RESEARCH STRATEGY
To manage your time effectively and focus on finding relevant information, plan a strategy for
conducting your research.
During “Step 2: Investigate,” you begin looking for sources for your speech. Although many
resources are easily available, not all of them will help you prepare a good speech. After all,
IDENTIFYING YOUR INFORMATION NEEDS
• Your information needs will change as you learn more about your topic and think about
your audience. Start by finding general information about your topic, then search for more
specific content. Use these four questions to guide your research process:
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○ What background information will my audience need? Depending on your audience
analysis, you may need to provide historical background or definitions of key terms in
○ What specific information is appropriate for my audience? Your audience analysis
should determine how much expertise your listeners have with your speech topic: a lot or
none at all.
○ How current does my information need to be? Some speeches cover topics for which the
information is fairly stable; but for others, information is changing fast. If your speech
topic falls into the latter category, use recent online articles, newspapers, magazines,
academic journals, and experts for your research.
DRAWING ON YOUR PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE
• Experience and personal stories often make presentations more memorable. Consider using
the following:
○ Reference lists you created as part of previous research papers or projects
○ News sources or reputable blogs you regularly view
TALKING WITH LIBRARIANS
• Librarians are specially trained to help you find the quality information you need.
○ By talking with a librarian about your specific purpose, you can get ideas for where to
start your research and which search terms to use in library databases.
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DOCUMENTING YOUR RESEARCH FINDINGS
• Your research strategy should include how you’ll document and file your findings. This will
help you organize your research and avoid committing plagiarism.
• Organize your research by doing the following:
1. Know the documentation style required.
a. Before you begin, look up the proper citation style.
b. Develop the habit of collecting complete bibliographic information for every source
you use.
2. Create a filing system to help maintain notes, printed articles, or online sources.
a. Create a digital or print folder system with meaningful subfolders so you can easily
3. Use online bookmarking systems to organize information you find on the Web. Try one
of the useful social bookmarking services like Delicious (www.delicious.com),
CiteULike (www.citeulike.org), or Diigo (www.diigo.com).
• Avoid plagiarism by documenting your research.
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○ Plagiarism is misrepresenting others’ works as your own and is a major academic, ethical,
and legal error. You commit plagiarism when you use exact words from someone else’s
○ To reduce your chances of plagiarizing, use the following three strategies:
1. Start early on the assignment. Rushing to prepare a speech can lead you to make
mistakes in documenting and orally citing your research sources.
2. Document everything. Develop the habit of putting clear source documentation on all
your research findings. Do this even if you’re just summarizing ideas. You don’t want
3. When in doubt, drop it. Don’t include information in your speech if you’ve lost the
source documentation.
CONDUCTING YOUR RESEARCH
Once you have determined your research strategy, you are ready for the next part of Step 2,
which is to conduct your research. This includes gathering relevant data from a combination
of print resources, Web sites, electronic databases, and conversations with people.
PRIMARY AND SECONDARY RESOURCES
• There are two types of research resources:
1. Primary resources are direct accounts, straight from the original source. These include
2. Secondary resources are works that analyze and interpret primary resources. Examples
of secondary sources include web postings, magazine articles, biographies, textbooks,
and newspaper articles. Secondary resources can help you interpret complex statistical
information and gather alternative opinions.
• Whether you use primary or secondary resources depends on your topic and your specific
purpose statement.
INTERNET RESOURCES
• Conducting research online involves more than just Googling your topic and seeing what
pops up. Instead, get the most out of your online research by knowing the types of resources
available online and how to best use them. Keep in mind the following:
○ Popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo! help you find information quickly but
can also create information overload. Evaluate the information quality of the links,
○ Sites ending in .com can provide quality information if they are objective, such as articles
from reputable newspapers and magazines.
○ Sometimes the most popular sites aren’t the best to use for research purposes.
○ Make sure the Web site meets the research requirements of the assignment.
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LIBRARY RESOURCES
• The library invests thousands, if not millions, of dollars annually to provide you with online
resources for conducting research.
○ Popular online library resources include EBSCOhost, LexisNexis Academic, and
ProQuest. These resources enable you to search newspapers; primary source documents;
periodicals; scholarly journals; government, business, and legal documents; and even
televised news transcripts.
○ Two popular and useful online resources for persuasive speech assignments include the
following:
1. CQ Researcher is a database, developed by journalists, of reports on specific themes,
2. Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center takes several of the best primary and secondary
sources available on controversial social issues and organizes them by topic.
INTERPERSONAL RESOURCES
• Talking with people one-on-one can provide useful information on your speech topic.