Examples are essential tools speakers use to clarify their ideas. An example, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a “typical instance; a fact, incident, quotation that illustrates a general principle, rule, state of things.”2 Without examples to illustrate, describe, or represent the points a speaker wants to convey, listeners would get lost in a sea of abstract statements.
Study the text of any winning speech or written work and you will quickly discover good examples that help make sense of things. Examples are especially important when describing new concepts to audience members, but even the familiar can be made clearer and more compelling with examples.
Examples can be brief or extended and may be either factual or hypothetical.
Brief Examples
Brief examples offer a single illustration of a point. In a speech about the nature of human choice, author and speaker Malcolm Gladwell uses the following example to illustrate his point that we can’t always put into words what we really want:
A critically important step in understanding our own desires and tastes is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want deep down. If I asked all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee, you know what you’d say? Every one of you would say, “I want a dark, rich, hearty roast.” It’s what people always say when you ask them what you want in a coffee. . . . What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast? According to Howard Moskowitz, market researcher and psychophysicist, somewhere between 25 and 27 percent of you. . . . 3
Extended Examples
Sometimes it takes more than a brief example to effectively illustrate a point. Extended examples offer multifaceted illustrations of the idea, item, or event being described, thereby allowing the speaker to create a more detailed picture for the audience. Here, Jonathan Drori uses an extended example to illustrate how pollen (the fertilizing element of plants) can provide strong circumstantial evidence linking criminals to their crimes:
Pollen forensics can be very subtle. It’s being used now to track where counterfeit drugs have been made, where banknotes have come from, to look at the provenance of antiques to see that they really did come from the place the seller said they did. And murder suspects have been tracked using their clothing. . . . Some of the people were brought to trial [in Bosnia] because of the evidence of pollen, which showed that bodies had been buried, exhumed, and then reburied somewhere else.4
Hypothetical Examples
In some speeches you may need to make a point about something that could happen in the future if certain things occurred. For example, if you argue the thesis “We should eliminate summer vacations for all school-age children,” you automatically raise the question of what will happen if this comes to pass. Since it hasn’t happened yet, you’ll need a hypothetical example of what you believe the outcome will be. Republican Representative Vernon Ehlers of Michigan offered the following hypothetical example when he spoke at a congressional hearing in support of a bill to ban human cloning:
What if in the cloning process you produce someone with two heads and three arms? Are you simply going to euthanize and dispose of that person? The answer is no. We’re talking about human life.5