9.3 Putting It Together: Steps to Complete Your Introduction — Stand up, Speak o (29/33) -- Stand Up Speak Out

9.3 Putting It Together: Steps to Complete Your Introduction — Stand up, Speak out 9.3 Putting It Together: Steps to Complete Your Introduction Learning Objectives - Clearly identify why an audience should listen to a speaker. - Discuss how you can build your credibility during a speech. - Understand how to write a clear thesis statement. - Design an effective preview of your speech’s content for your audience. Erin Brown-John – puzzle – CC BY-NC 2.0. Once you have captured your audience’s attention, it’s important to make the rest of your introduction interesting, and use it to lay out the rest of the speech. In this section, we are going to explore the five remaining parts of an effective introduction: linking to your topic, reasons to listen, stating credibility, thesis statement, and preview. Link to Topic After the attention-getter, the second major part of an introduction is called the link to topic. The link to topic is the shortest part of an introduction and occurs when a speaker demonstrates how an attention-getting device relates to the topic of a speech. Often the attention-getter and the link to topic are very clear. For example, if you look at the attention-getting device example under historical reference above, you’ll see that the first sentence brings up the history of the Vietnam War and then shows us how that war can help us understand the Iraq War. In this case, the attention-getter clearly flows directly to the topic. However, some attention-getters need further explanation to get to the topic of the speech. For example, both of the anecdote examples (the girl falling into the manhole while texting and the boy and the filberts) need further explanation to connect clearly to the speech topic (i.e., problems of multitasking in today’s society). Let’s look at the first anecdote example to demonstrate how we could go from the attention-getter to the topic. In July 2009, a high school girl named Alexa Longueira was walking along a main boulevard near her home on Staten Island, New York, typing in a message on her cell phone. Not paying attention to the world around her, she took a step and fell right into an open manhole. This anecdote illustrates the problem that many people are facing in today’s world. We are so wired into our technology that we forget to see what’s going on around us—like a big hole in front of us. In this example, the third sentence here explains that the attention-getter was an anecdote that illustrates a real issue. The fourth sentence then introduces the actual topic of the speech. Let’s now examine how we can make the transition from the parable or fable attention-getter to the topic: The ancient Greek writer Aesop told a fable about a boy who put his hand into a pitcher of filberts. The boy grabbed as many of the delicious nuts as he possibly could. But when he tried to pull them out, his hand wouldn’t fit through the neck of the pitcher because he was grasping so many filberts. Instead of dropping some o