Select examples that are interesting, exciting, and clear and use them to reinforce your main ideas. Examples not only support your key points but also provide interesting ways for your audience to visualize what you are talking about. If you are giving a speech about the movie career of Clint Eastwood, you would provide examples of some of his most popular films (Dirty Harry, In the Line of Fire), his early western films (Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, Hang ’Em High), his lesser-known films (The First Traveling Saleslady, Honkytonk Man), and his directorial efforts (Gran Torino, Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River, J. Edgar). You might also provide quotes from reviews of his films to show the way Eastwood has been perceived at different points in his career.

When you are offering examples to explain a concept, it’s important to choose examples that your audience will understand. Some examples may be familiar enough to your audience that you can make quick references to them with little explanation. If you are giving a speech today on community planning and rebuilding after disasters, you could probably mention Moore, Oklahoma, after the 2013 tornados or Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, and almost any adult member of your audience will get it. But other examples or audiences might require more detail and explanation. For example, if you are giving a speech about conformity, you might wish to use as an example the incident in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978, when more than nine hundred members of a religious cult committed mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced punch. As with many aspects of delivering a speech, audience analysis is crucial: if you are speaking to a younger audience, you’ll need to offer a good deal of explanation to make this example work. However, an audience consisting mainly of baby boomers, historians, or social psychologists would require little more than a brief reference to “Jonestown” to get the point of the example.