Topics for Informative Presentations

Your audience is an important variable to consider as you choose your topic. Your goal in an informative presentation is to meet the audience’s informational needs, so you must understand their knowledge and interests. Before you decide to inform your audience about backyard gardening, solicit information about your listeners using the strategies in Chapter 12. If you learn that most of your audience members live in apartments, they probably won’t care about gardening in a backyard they don’t have.

When it comes to choosing a topic for an informative speech, there are countless options. You can speak, for example, about something very concrete, such as a person, place, thing, process, or event; or about something more abstract, such as a concept or phenomenon. In many cases, your topic will fit into more than one category: for example, a speech on the phenomenon of hip-hop music might include descriptions of the genre (thing) as well as of particular bands (people) and performances (events). You might also talk about the way the music developed over time (process). We’ll take a look at eight categories for informative speech topics identified by communication researchers Ron Allen and Ray McKerrow (1985) in the sections that follow.

image
FROM LEGENDARY movie stars to historic natural disasters, you can develop a compelling informative speech on virtually anything (or anyone!). (top left) Getty Images; (top right) © Columbia Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection; (bottom left) imago stock&people/Newscom; (bottom right) TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/AFP/Getty Images