Good organization makes the message clear.

Carly stood at the lectern and announced to her audience that her speech would be about magazines targeted at women and teenage girls. She showed her listeners several magazine advertisements featuring gaunt models and explained how listeners could help friends struggling with anorexia or bulimia. One of the ads was for cosmetics, and Carly presented evidence supporting the claim that the testing of cosmetics harms animals. Carly also presented several magazine articles with titles she considered inane—such as “What His Kitchen Tells You about Him” and “Are You a Katniss or a Bella?” She then contrasted these articles with pieces from more serious magazines.

Carly concluded her speech with a plea for audience members to cancel their subscriptions to women’s magazines. Then she sat down, feeling confident that she had scored a success with her audience. During the evaluation of her speech, however, many of her classmates said they’d had trouble following her presentation. Some admitted that they’d found her ideas downright confusing. Surprised and upset by the feedback, Carly didn’t realize that she had made an all-too-common mistake: failing to organize her speech clearly.

Carly’s story reveals the importance of organization in developing a successful speech. When you organize your ideas clearly, you help your audience see how the different ideas in your presentation fit together, which allows them to better comprehend your message.¹ They know what to listen for because your organization provides cues to indicate the main ideas. And they don’t have to devote their mental energy to figuring out your main points and how all the details in your speech relate to those points.

Good organization is particularly important in oral communication because listeners don’t have the luxury of reviewing printed information to understand your message. By contrast, those who are reading a printed message—whether in a book, a magazine, or online—can go back and reread the text if they’re confused. Thus, when giving a speech, you must take special care to help the audience follow your ideas.

When you organize your speech clearly, you also enhance your credibility. Effective organization shows that you have taken the time to prepare your talk.²

Organizing a speech is not merely a matter of applying an arbitrary set of rules. Rather, a well-organized presentation imposes order on the set of points you present in your speech by showing the relationship between ideas. Thus, the organizational pattern you select can communicate important information to the audience: What are the most important ideas? Why do you believe that each idea has merit? What evidence are you providing to back up your claims?

In this chapter, we focus on organizing the body of your speech—the part where you present your main points and support them with examples, narratives, testimony, and other materials. To organize a speech effectively, you must learn to group your ideas into a sequence your audience can easily follow. In the following pages, we explore ways to select your main points and structure your supporting materials. We also examine common patterns for arranging main points, and present some organizing language you can use to make your speech structure clear to your audience.