Before you decide what to say in a speech, consider your strategy: Identify your purpose (reason) for speaking, your audience (listeners), and the context (situation) in which you will speak.
To begin, think about what you want to accomplish with your talk or what you would like to occur as a result.
When you are thinking about purpose, you are mostly focused on strategy and not so much on content. You are thinking about what you want to do. What you want to say comes later.
Next think about audience. Effective speakers identify the needs and expectations of their audience and shape their material accordingly. Assess what your audience may already know and believe, what objections you might need to anticipate, and how you might interact with your listeners.
Ask yourself: Who is my audience? How should I interact with my listeners? Effective speakers find ways to connect to their listeners, to assure them that their feelings, beliefs, and ideas are understood and respected (appealing to pathos).
As you consider audience, you might realize that you will be speaking to people from different groups or cultures, so you will need to be careful about your assumptions and respectful of different beliefs.
Finally, think about the situation that surrounds your speech. You might be speaking within a political or religious context, for example. You need to be true to yourself and your values, but you don’t want to offend anyone in the audience.
Or you might be speaking within an environmental or a technical context. If you are presenting an argument about wind power, you might need to be alert to audience members who know that turbines kill many birds and also alter microclimates by affecting wind patterns in a region. In all cases, you want to your particular assumptions and point of view. Think about whether others would view things differently.
Using ethos, logos, and pathos as a speaker