DRAFTING YOUR SPECIFIC PURPOSE
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After you’ve identified your rhetorical purpose and narrowed your topic, your next step is to determine your specific purpose—the objective of your speech—and express it in a concise phrase.
To write your specific purpose, start with a phrase expressing your rhetorical purpose (“to inform,” “to persuade,” or “to mark a special occasion”), then add language indicating what you want to accomplish in your speech. Some good examples follow:
- “To inform my audience about the events at a Portuguese festa”
- “To persuade my audience to drink milk produced by our state’s dairy farms”
- “To honor the first responders and volunteers who helped our community recover in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy
You can use your specific purpose to guide which ideas you should develop in your speech. When selecting ideas, choose those that help you accomplish your specific purpose, and exclude those that are not relevant. Thus, like the sideline on a football field, your specific purpose indicates which ideas are “out of bounds” given your speech’s objective.
