Coms 101 Study Guide 2

8 Steps for Preparing to Speak

1) Decide on a topic

2) Demonstrate ethical behavior throughout the

process

3) Determine the general purpose, specific

purpose, and thesis statement

4) Define your audience

5) Document your ideas through firm support and

sound reasoning

6) Draft the beginning, middle, and end

7) Develop the language of your speech with care

8) Deliver your speech while making your tension

work for you

Topic Selection (step 1)

Best place to begin in picking a speech topic is yourself. Your own interests

Ethical Behavior (step 2)

ethics needs to be held in:

how you approach your topic, where you get the information, how you edit or interpret information, word choice, and distinguishing between your own ideas and those which needs to be cited

Plagiarism

involves using other's works, words, or ideas without adequate acknowledgement.

General Purpose (step 3)

There are 3 general purposes for speeches: to inform, to persuade, and to entertain or inspire.

-Often the purposes overlap or converge

-Hard to make speech just informative or persuasive or entertaining

Specific Purpose (step 3)

should be expressed as an infinitive phrase that includes the general purpose as well as the main thrust of your speech.

-also identifies who the audience will be.

Thesis Statement (step 3)

(your core idea) focuses on what you want to say.

This statement distills your speech to one sentence, summarizing your main idea.

-central message you want your listeners to take with them

Audience definition (step 4)

speaker analyzes and adapts to the audience. Involves finding out as much as possible about your audience.

-What are their demographics? (race, age, gender, religious affliction, political affliction,ext)

-What is their level of knowledge about your topic?

-Is the audience there because they want to be?

Document ideas through support and sound reasoning (step 5)

by using facts, statistics, examples, testimony,...