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Examples illustrate, describe, or represent things. Their purpose is to aid understanding by making ideas, items, or events more concrete. Examples are particularly helpful when they are used to describe or explain things with which the audience is unfamiliar. Brief examples offer a single illustration of a point. In a speech titled “The Coming Golden Age of Medicine,” Richard F. Corlin offers the following brief example to illustrate what American medicine can do:
We often hear about the problems of the American health care delivery system, but just think what it can do. My 88-year-old father who needed a hip replacement got it— the week it was discovered that he needed it. That couldn’t happen in any other country in the world.1
Sometimes it takes more than a brief example to effectively illustrate a point. Extended examples offer multifaceted illustrations of the idea, item, or event being described, thereby getting the point across and reiterating it effectively.
Jonathan Drori uses an extended example to illustrate how pollen can link criminals to their crimes:
Pollen forensics . . . [is] being used now to track where counterfeit drugs have been made, where banknotes have come from. . . . And murder suspects have been tracked using their clothing. . . . Some of the people were brought to trial [in Bosnia] because of the evidence of pollen, which showed that bodies had been buried, exhumed, and then reburied somewhere else.2
In some speeches, you may need to make a point about something that could happen in the future if certain events were to occur. Since it hasn’t happened yet, you’ll need a hypothetical example of what you believe the outcome might be. Republican Representative Vernon Ehlers of Michigan offered the following hypothetical example when he spoke at a congressional hearing in support of a bill to ban human cloning:
What if in the cloning process you produce someone with two heads and three arms? Are you simply going to euthanize and dispose of that person? The answer is no. We’re talking about human life.3