Drafting Your Specific Purpose

After you’ve identified your rhetorical purpose and narrowed your topic, your next step is to determine your specific purpose—the objective of your speech—and express it in a concise phrase.

To write your specific purpose, start with a phrase expressing your rhetorical purpose (“to inform,” “to persuade,” or “to mark a special occasion”), and then add language indicating what you want to accomplish in your speech. Some good examples follow:

179

image

You can use your specific purpose to guide which ideas you should develop in your speech. When selecting ideas, choose those that help you accomplish your specific purpose, and exclude those that are not relevant. Thus, like the sideline on a football field, your specific purpose indicates which ideas are “out of bounds” given your speech’s objective.