"What is real?" "is there really such thing as a mountain?"

These are a couple of the questions we pondered in class as we considered how to inform someone about something. There are philosophical problems about reality and knowledge that people have been trying to answer for thousands of years. Presenting credible, reliable, dependable and reliable information can be a formatiable task. Some evidence is simply better than other evidence. Likewise, some sources are better than others. Primary data and primary sources are the "best" sources to have but in this class and as an undergraduate (generally) secondary sources are not only acceptable but often preferable.


Examples of good sources of evidence for your informative speeches:
Newspapers
Books
Textbooks
CQ researcher
Interviews
Speeches


It behooves you to have a topic and at least a rough outline of a speech for Saturday's class. If you have an outline and a good portion of your speech, then we will be able to work on the issues YOU have IN CLASS. If you do not have an outline or a topic, then you will have to workout all of those issues by yourself the week leading up to speech day.

In our last class we discussed a lot of important issues. A lot. We had a topic generating activity were we stressed the significance of a topic. Choosing a challenging topic is an essential element of creating an "A" level informative or persuasive speech. I demonstrated how to take a seemingly shallow topic and use questions about interconnectedness and interdependence to supply depth to your discussion. In other words, to find the significance of a topic you need to explore relationships and issues of dependence (you should ask me more questions about this).

Another key issue we discussed is organization. We have been talking about organization over and over again because it is the key to a good speech. How one organizes main points adds to the effectiveness, clarity and creativity of a speech. You have many options for organizing your information, chronologically, by cause and effect, effect and cause, by differences, by simularites. There are many, many ways to organize a speech. 

Stay tuned for more...




Leave a Reply.