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PART 2 INFORMATIVE SPEECHES
Informative speeches impart knowledge, raise awareness, or deepen an audience’s understanding of a phenomenon. An informative speech might analyze a controversy, report on an event, or demonstrate a procedure.
An informative speech isn’t just a dumping ground for data. You must get the people in your audience invested in your topic so that they will retain the information you give them in your speech.
Analyze your audience to learn its level of familiarity with and interest in your topic, then adjust your thesis accordingly. It’s difficult for the members of an audience to retain pertinent information when they are overwhelmed by facts, figures, or descriptions.
Even interested audiences will need help processing a large amount of new information. You can keep your audience engaged by:
Opening with an introduction that previews the thesis and its main points
Using transition phrases (e.g., “First of all . . .”; “The next reason why . . .”; “We’ve just spoken about X. Now we’ll examine Y . . .”) to clearly delineate separate ideas
Using internal previews to tell the audience what main points are coming up
Using internal summaries to remind your audience of the main points that have just been discussed
Using repetition, parallelism, rhetorical questions, and other rhetorical devices to reinforce your main points
Selecting an organizational pattern that highlights the relationships between your main points