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CHAPTER 7

The late, great baseball player Yogi Berra, famously prone to mangling popular sayings,¹ once said “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” Presumably, Berra meant the actual saying: “You must know where you are going in order to get there.”

No words were ever truer for the public speaker. Unless you know what you want to say and why you want to say it—your topic and purpose—you won’t get there—giving a speech that works. Thus one of the first tasks in preparing any speech is to select a topic and purpose that are appropriate to the audience, occasion, and overall speech situation (rhetorical situation). You should be able to answer three key questions with total confidence before delivering any speech: “What precisely is my speech about?” “What is my goal in speaking to the audience?” and “What specifically do I want my listeners to know or do?”