Now that you have your general purpose, a speech topic, and your audience analysis, you’re ready to write a specific purpose for your speech. 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 what you learn in your analysis will influence your statement. For example, suppose you’re preparing a speech to inform your audience about the topic of bullying. Through informal polling, you discover that many of your audience members have experienced or witnessed bullying in the workplace, rather than in school. Therefore, you would want to emphasize that fact in your specific purpose statement: “I want to inform my audience about how to effectively handle bullying in the workplace.”

Your specific purpose statement will help you prepare your speech, but it isn’t set in stone; you may decide to adjust it while researching your speech. For example, let’s say your specific purpose is “I want to persuade my audience to take steps to manage their privacy online.” While researching this topic, you discover interesting information about identity theft, including stories of college students as victims. As a result, you could change your specific purpose statement to “I want to persuade my audience to take steps to protect themselves from identity theft.”