Suggested Activities for Chapter 9

1. Have students analyze sample student outlines or speech manuscripts to determine what organizational patterns are commonly used.
2. Put students in a circle. Give them a minute or so to find out about their neighbors, if they do not already know them. Pretend the whole class is giving a giant speech of introduction. You start by omitting the actual speech, but including the transitions as you move from person to person. For example, “Now that we’ve talked about Marietta and her dachshund breeding, let’s move on to Carl and his favorite team, the Dallas Cowboys.”
3. Put students in small groups and give them a topic. Then have them generate as many organizational schemes as possible for each of the five patterns. Display the work and have the class select the best.
4. Organize students into coordinating and subordinating clumps based on categories such as college, program, major subject, track and field, and so on. Then have students generate the organizational pattern, transitions, and internal previews and summaries for a speech on these topics.
5. Show students a video clip of a stand-up comic doing his or her routine. Discuss how the routine is organized and how the comic uses transitions to segue from one bit to the next.
6. Have students look at the subordination cartoon on page 261. Using a sample speech, draw a diagram of the main point, subpoints, and sub-subpoints to graphically illustrate the nature of subordination. Make sure each point is supported by two subpoints.