After you’ve selected an appropriate topic from your list of possibilities, stick with it. In our experience, students who agonize over their topic selection for days or waver back and forth between several possibilities lose valuable speech preparation time.

An analysis of more than one thousand speech diaries kept by public speaking students revealed one consistent difference between strong speeches and weaker ones—the topic selection process. The more successful speakers carefully considered their topic choice but chose a topic promptly and then stayed with it, investing the bulk of their time in preparation. The less successful speakers spent days trying to settle on an acceptable topic.5