pocketspeak4e

Narrow Your Topic

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Once you’ve settled on a topic and have established a general speech purpose, you’ll need to narrow your focus to align with audience expectations, time constraints, and the nature of the occasion. (See “From Source to Speech: Narrowing Your Topic to Fit Your Audience”):

Consider what your listeners are likely to know about the subject and what they will want to learn.
Consider what aspects of the topic are most relevant to the occasion. Restrict your focus to what you can competently research and then report on in the time you are given to speak.
Pick a discrete topic category and cover it well.
Restrict your main points to between two and five.

Just as brainstorming can be used to discover a topic, it can also be helpful in narrowing one. One way of doing this is to brainstorm by category (e.g., subtopic). Say your general topic is video games. Some related categories are platform (handheld, arcade), type (racing, roleplaying), or operating system (Linux, Macintosh, Windows). To brainstorm topics by category online, consider browsing a subject (Web) directory, such as that found on Yahoo! A subject directory provides a searchable listing of topic categories such as “Science,” “Health,” and “Business and Economy.” Each subject category links to subtopics; each subtopic links to its own subcategories, and so on (for more on subject directories, see Chapter 10).