After determining the information needs of your audience, it’s time to write out your specific purpose statement, which is one complete sentence that summarizes your goal for the speech. As with any presentation, your specific purpose statement for an informative talk helps you narrow your topic. It also keeps you focused as you research and compose your speech. It will eventually form the basis for your speech thesis—the sentence that identifies the central idea of your presentation for your audience.

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As you write your specific purpose statement, keep in mind what your audience already knows about your speech topic. By targeting your specific purpose to the audience’s level of knowledge, you avoid information overload, which happens when the amount and nature of material exceeds listeners’ ability to process it. For example, the health care workers in Uganda keep presentations about malaria at a basic level and avoid overwhelming the villagers with unnecessary medical jargon. When preparing your own speeches, use audience analysis to adapt your specific purpose statement to meet the information needs of your listeners.

You’ll also want to focus the specific purpose statement on one central idea. Suppose you’re assigned a 10-minute presentation on the Bauhaus movement for your art history class. Trying to cover the movement’s impact on typography, architecture, and other art forms would be difficult to do in the assigned time. Instead, it would be better to narrow the topic to cover the movement’s impact on just one area.

Whenever you’re preparing an informative speech, start by writing a specific purpose statement appropriate to the audience and situation. Table 16.2 shows examples of specific purpose statements for a wide range of informative speech situations. A specific purpose statement brings clarity to your speech preparation. But sticking to the general purpose of informing rather than persuading an audience can be tricky if you don’t understand how they differ.