Informative Speaking

[email protected] (BBA-4th)
 Introduction:
• An informative speech conveys knowledge, a task that you’ve engaged in throughout your
life. When you give driving directions, you convey knowledge. When you caution someone
about crossing the street at a certain intersection, you are describing a dangerous
situation. When you steer someone away from using the car pool lane, you are explaining
what it’s for.
 Why we speak to inform?
• Informative speaking is a means for the delivery of knowledge. In informative speaking,
we avoid expressing opinion.
• This doesn’t mean you may not speak about controversial topics. However, if you do so,
you must deliver a fair statement of each side of the issue in debate. If your speech is about
standardized educational testing, you must honestly represent the views both of its
proponents and of its critics. You must not take sides, and you must not slant your
explanation of the debate in order to influence the opinions of the listeners. You are
simply and clearly defining the debate. If you watch the news on a major network
television you will see newscasters who undoubtedly have personal opinions about the
news, but are trained to avoid expressing those opinions using loaded words, gestures,
facial expressions, or vocal tone
 Choosing Topic for informative speech:
• An informative speech does not attempt to convince the audience that one thing is better
than another. It does not advocate a course of action. Let’s say for instance, that you have
carefully followed news on murder by mob (blasphemy accusation) of a Sri-Lankan
manager . Let’s further say that you felt outraged by the sequence of events that led to the
spill and, even more so, by its consequences.
• Consider carefully whether this is a good topic for your informative speech. If your speech
describes the process of offshore oil exploration, it will be informative. However, if it
expresses your views on what petroleum corporations should do to safeguard their
personnel and the environment, save that topic for a persuasive speech.
 Informative VS persuasive
• Being honest about your private agenda in choosing a topic is important. It is not always
easy to discern a clear line between informative and persuasive speech. Good information
has a strong tendency to be persuasive, and persuasion relies on good information. Thus
informative and persuasive speaking do overlap. It remains up to you to examine your real
motives in choosing your topic. As we have said in various ways, ethical speaking means
respecting the intelligence of your audience.
 Informative Speaking Goals

• A good informative speech conveys accurate information to the audience clearly and that
keeps the listener interested in the topic. Achieving all three of these goals—accuracy,
clarity, and interest—is the key to your effectiveness as a speaker. If information is
inaccurate, incomplete, or unclear, it will be of limited usefulness to the audience. There is
no topic about which you can give complete information, and therefore, we strongly
recommend careful narrowing. With a carefully narrowed topic and purpose, it is possible
to give an accurate picture that isn’t misleading.
 Goals
• For your listeners to benefit from your speech, you must convey your ideas in a fashion
that your audience can understand. The clarity of your speech relies on logical
organization and understandable word choices. You should not assume that something
that’s obvious to you will also be obvious to the members of your audience. Formulate
your work with the objective of being understood in all details and rehearse your speech in
front of peers who will tell you whether the information in your speech makes sense.
• In addition to being clear, your speech should be interesting. Your listeners will benefit
the most if they can give sustained attention to the speech, and this is unlikely to happen if
they are bored
 Adjust Complexity to the Audience
• If your speech is too complex or too simplistic, it will not hold the interest of your
listeners. How can you determine the right level of complexity? Your audience analysis is
one important way to do this. Will your listeners belong to a given age group, or are they
more diverse? Did they all go to public schools in the United States, or are some of your
listeners international students? Are they all students majoring in communication studies,
or is there a mixture of majors in your audience? The answers to these and other audience
analysis questions will help you to gauge what they know and what they are curious about.
 Avoid Unnecessary Jargon
• If you decide to give an informative speech on a highly specialized topic,
limit how much technical language or jargon you use. Loading a speech
with specialized language has the potential to be taxing on the listeners. It
can become too difficult to “translate” your meanings, and if that happens,
you will not effectively deliver information. Even if you define many
technical terms, the audience may feel as if they are being bombarded with
a set of definitions instead of useful information. Don’t treat your speech as
a crash course in an entire topic. If you must, introduce one specialized term
and carefully define and explain it to the audience.
 Create Concrete Images
• As a college student, you have had a significant amount of exposure to
abstract terms. You have become comfortable using and hearing a variety
of abstract ideas. However, abstract terms lend themselves to many
interpretations. For instance, the abstract term “responsibility” can mean
many things. Among other meanings, it can mean duty, task, authority, or
blame. Because of the potential for misunderstanding, it is better to use a
concrete word. Abstract Concrete
transportation air travel
success completion of project
 Keep Information Limited
• When you developed your speech, you carefully narrowed your topic in
order to keep information limited yet complete and coherent. If you
carefully adhere to your own narrowing, you can keep from going off on
tangents or confusing your audience. If you overload your audience with
information, they will be unable to follow your narrative.
 Ethics

• Honesty and credibility must undergird your presentation; otherwise, they

betray the trust of your listeners. Therefore, if you choose a topic that
turns out to be too difficult, you must decide what will serve the needs and
interests of the audience. Shortcuts and oversimplifications are not the
answer.
Link Current Knowledge to New Knowledge

• Certain sets of knowledge are common to many people in your classroom

audience. For instance, most of them know what Wikipedia is. Many have
found it a useful and convenient source of information about topics related
to their coursework. Because many Wikipedia entries are lengthy, greatly
annotated, and followed by substantial lists of authoritative sources, many
students have relied on information acquired from Wikipedia in writing
papers to fulfill course requirements. All this is information that virtually
every classroom listener is likely to know. This is the current knowledge of
your audience.
 Difficult to Understand because It’s Hard to
Believe
• A third source of audience confusion, and perhaps the most difficult to
address as a speaker, is an idea that’s difficult to understand because it’s
hard to believe. This often happens when people have implicit, but
erroneous, theories about how the world works
 Make it memorable
• If you’ve already done the preliminary work in choosing a topic, finding
an interesting narrowing of that topic, developing and using presentation
aids, and working to maintain audience contact, your delivery is likely to
be memorable. Now you can turn to your content and find opportunities to
make it appropriately vivid. You can do this by using explanations,
comparisons, examples, or language.
 Make It Relevant and Useful
• When thinking about your topic, it is always very important to keep your
audience members center stage in your mind. For instance, if your speech
is about air pollution, ask your audience to imagine feeling the burning of
eyes and lungs caused by smog.
 Personalize Your Content
• Giving a human face to a topic helps the audience perceive it as
interesting. If your topic is related to the Maasai rite of passage into
manhood, the prevalence of drug addiction in a particular locale, the
development of a professional filmmaker, or the treatment of a disease,
putting a human face should not be difficult. To do it, find a case study
you can describe within the speech, referring to the human subject by
name.
 Types of Informative Speeches
1.object:
• The term “objects” encompasses many topics we might not ordinarily consider to be
“things.” It’s a category that includes people, institutions, places, substances, and
inanimate things. The following are some of these topics:
• • Mitochondria
• • Dream catchers
• • Sharks
• • Hubble telescope
• • Seattle’s Space Needle
 2.People

• This category applies both to specific individuals and also to roles. The
following are some of these topics:

• • Mahatma Gandhi
• • Justice Thurgood Marshall
• • Madame Curie
 3.Event
• An event can be something that occurred only once, or an event that is
repeated:
• • The Industrial Revolution
• • The discovery of the smallpox vaccine
• • The Academy Awards
 4.Concepts

• Concepts are abstract ideas that exist independent of whether they are observed or practiced, such
as the example of social equality that follows. Concepts can include hypotheses and theories.
• • The glass ceiling
• • Ethnocentrism
• • Honor codes
• • Autism
• • Karma
• • Wellness
• • Fairness theory
 5.Processes
• If your speech topic is a process, your goal should be to help your audience
understand it, or be able to perform it. In either instance, processes involve a
predictable series of changes, phases, or steps.
• • Soil erosion
• • Cell division
• • Physical therapy
• • Volcanic eruption
• • Paper recycling
 Select your topic for informative speech
• Discuss!!
• Make a rough draft