10.1 Determining Your Main Ideas — Stand up, Speak out
10.1 Determining Your Main Ideas — Stand up, Speak out
10.1 Determining Your Main Ideas
Learning Objectives
- Revisit the function of a specific purpose.
- Understand how to make the transition from a specific purpose to a series of main points.
- Be able to narrow a speech from all the possible points to the main points.
- Explain how to prepare meaningful main points.
Matt Wynn – Lightbulb! – CC BY 2.0.
When creating a speech, it’s important to remember that speeches have three clear parts: an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. The introduction establishes the topic and whets your audience’s appetite, and the conclusion wraps everything up at the end of your speech. The real “meat” of your speech happens in the body. In this section, we’re going to discuss how to think strategically about the body of your speech.
We like the word strategic because it refers to determining what is important or essential to the overall plan or purpose of your speech. Too often, new speakers just throw information together and stand up and start speaking. When that happens, audience members are left confused and the reason for the speech may get lost. To avoid being seen as disorganized, we want you to start thinking critically about the organization of your speech. In this section, we will discuss how to take your speech from a specific purpose to creating the main points of your speech.
What Is Your Specific Purpose?
Before we discuss how to determine the main points of your speech, we want to revisit your speech’s specific purpose, which we discussed in detail in Chapter 6 “Finding a Purpose and Selecting a Topic”. Recall that a speech can have one of three general purposes: to inform, to persuade, or to entertain. The general purpose refers to the broad goal for creating and delivering the speech. The specific purpose, on the other hand, starts with one of those broad goals (inform, persuade, or entertain) and then further informs the listener about the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the speech.
The specific purpose is stated as a sentence incorporating the general purpose, the specific audience for the speech, and a prepositional phrase that summarizes the topic. Here are three examples (each with a different general purpose and a different audience):
| General Purpose | To inform |
| Specific Purpose | To inform a group of school administrators about the various open-source software packages that could be utilized in their school districts |
| General Purpose | To persuade |
| Specific Purpose | To persuade a group of college students to make the switch from Microsoft Office to the open-source office suite OpenOffice |
| General Purpose | To entertain |
| Specific Purpose | To entertain members of a business organization with a mock eulogy of for-pay software giants as a result of the proliferation of open-source alternatives |
In each of these three examples, you’ll notice that the general topic is the same—open-source software—but the specif