Suggested Activities for Chapter 16

1. Play the classic “telephone game” using a sentence that exemplifies one of the five types of informative speaking: speaking about an object, an individual or group, an event, a process, or an idea. Arrange the class in a circle and whisper the starting sentence to the person on your right, who will in turn whisper it to the person on their right, and so on until it goes completely around the class. When the message gets back to you, announce the original sentence and the resultant sentence. Discuss the forms the message took in other parts of the circle as well. See if the initial phrase transformed into one of the other types of informative speaking along the way and lead a discussion of what that may mean.
2. Have each student write down a fact they know. Collect the papers and tally student responses according to how they would fit into the types of informative speaking. Do the facts relate evenly to objects, individuals or groups, events, processes, and ideas? Or do students tend to choose one or several types of information over the others? Discuss the results in terms of audience analysis and the way the class seems to be thinking about things. Are there any predominant trends, for example, more concrete than abstract facts, and if so, how might a speaker take this into account in terms of audience analysis?
3. Ask students to outline the sample speeches. Require them to circle transitions, label supporting material, and identify techniques for informing.
4. Assign students or small groups excerpts of different technical or specialized articles and have them clarify and simplify the language. Ask students or groups to present both the original technical version and their clarified version to the class. Discuss which version would be more easily understood and remembered and why.
5. If you assign the “Mapping Out Informative Approaches” Ready-to-Print Activity, after the activity is finished, ask students to highlight or circle the informative speech topics in the third column that would work the best with their audience. This activity reviews audience analysis and can also be used to generate speech topics.