02A Lesson Proper for Week 8

The type of speech is determined by the topic, purpose, audience, and context. Speakers
adjust language, complexity, and manner of delivery to suit these criteria. The following are
the types of speech according to purpose:

INFORMATIVE SPEECH

The speech style provides the audience with information to have a clear understanding of
objects, people, processes, concepts, and ideas. The speaker does this by describing,
demonstrating, giving details, and defining. Organization, repetition, and visualization of key
points help effectively impart knowledge to listeners so that they understand and recall what
they have heard. Research is needed to ensure that details and information are complete
and correct. The speaker should not include personal bias and opinion. The speaker also
needs to think about the audience, their needs, relevance, and prior knowledge of the topic.

Four categories of informative speech:

1. Object or descriptive speeches

This informative speech seeks to impart tangible things knowledge about people, animals,
places, things, or experiences. The speaker provides an overview of the topic using sensory
language that appeals to the senses to create a vivid and detailed picture.

Topics that may be used in descriptive speeches:

• Places you loved as a child

• Piece of modern art
• An eco-tourism destination in your area

2. Process or demonstrative speeches

This informative speech demonstrates how something is made, is done, and works. The
speaker helps the audience understand the process so they may be able to do it
themselves where applicable. Visuals of completed steps are used to support the audience
retain and recall the steps.

Topics that may be used in demonstrative speeches:

• How to use a learning platform

• How to set realistic goals
• Ways to protect your mental health

3. Events or explanatory speeches

This informative speech explains an occurrence or event. The speaker describes the time,
date, location, and circumstances of these events. The speech focuses on how and why
certain customs, transformations, inventions, policies, and outcomes might have happened.
The information can be organized thru a chronology, topical, or cause and effect. Data and
statistics may be presented in visuals like timelines, graphs, and tables.

Topics that may be used in explanatory speeches:

• The effects of the lockdowns on global trade

• The reality show phenomenon
• The history of autism as a diagnosis

4. Concepts or definition speeches

This informative speech defines concepts, ideas, beliefs, theories, attitudes, principles, and
issues. The definition may include historical derivation, classification, synonyms of terms,
background, and core attributes of a concept. Concrete ideas such as explicit examples,
context, and applications make abstract ideas relatable and tangible to your audience.
Concept speeches break down complex ideas into manageable chunks of understanding for
your audience.

Topics that may be used in definition speeches:

• Big Bang Theory

• Philosophy of Education
• Me Too Movement

We may follow any of the five patterns of organizing an informative speech, as follows:

1. Chronological order – Information is organized according to time of occurrence,

either from the present back to the past or from the past to the present.
2. Spatial order – Information is organized according to how things fit in location or
space.
3. Cause-effect – Information may be organized from a cause or the root to an effect
or result. There may be one cause and several effects or one effect and several
causes.

Example: The cause is poverty. The effects are crime, drug addiction, and early marriage.

4. Comparison and contrast – This pattern shows the similarities and differences
between the two main points.
5. Categorical or topical – Information may be presented according to category,
family, or topic. This organization of pieces of information shows the general topic
and the sub-topics that support it.

Sample Illustration 1
Excerpt from Marie Curie's speech on the discovery of radium:

I could tell you many things about radium and radioactivity and it would take a long time. But
as we can not do that, I shall only give you a short account of my early work about radium.
Radium is no more a baby, it is more than twenty years old, but the conditions of the discovery
were somewhat peculiar, and so it is always of interest to remember them and to explain them.
We must go back to the year 1897. Professor Curie and I worked at that time in the laboratory
of the school of Physics and Chemistry where Professor Curie held his lectures. I was engaged
in some work on uranium rays which had been discovered two years before by Professor
Becquerel.***I spent some time in studying the way of making good measurements of the
uranium rays, and then I wanted to know if there were other elements, giving out rays of the
same kind. So I took up a work about all known elements, and their compounds and found that
uranium compounds are active and also all thorium compounds, but other elements were not
found active, nor were their compounds. As for the uranium and thorium compounds, I found
that they were active in proportion to their uranium or thorium content.

https://www.softschools.com/examples/grammar/informative_speech_examples/384/

ENTERTAINING SPEECH

This type of speech aims to share goodwill, joy, and pleasure with the audience. The
entertainment speech is also called the speech for a special occasion. The tone of the
speaker is conversational, friendly, and relaxed. The speaker must know the audience to
entertain them effectively.

Examples:

Roast speeches

Speech by a special guest during a graduation

Speech writing checklist (Peterson 2015)

• Give a dramatic twist to common issues. Add emotion to your speech and cite
real situations that touch/affect people.
• Perform dialogues and metaphors. A speech becomes alive and lively with the
injection of conversations. The uses of metaphors make the speech vivid and
colorful, thereby appealing to the audience.
• Tell a personal experience and interrelate a humorous anecdote to the main
theme. Nobody can disprove your experience because it is an actual event that you
had undergone. A humorous anecdote also adds flavor to your speech.
• Give mocking comments on ordinary things, persons, places, values, or
thoughts. This approach awakes the thinking and reasoning skills of the audience to
see familiar things and give comments.
Balgos and Sipacio (2016) list five steps in writing an entertaining speech:

1. Choose - Choose a light topic that you want to share with your audience. It may be
an anecdote or experience that you feel worth sharing; it may be funny or scary.
2. Enjoy – When you feel relaxed while delivering your entertainment speech, the
audience will also feel good.
3. Simplify – Make the flow of your speech simple and less formal. The audience
should not feel tight while listening.
4. Visualize – Use descriptive, vivid words that appeal to the five senses to make your
audience go with the flow and listen.
5. Surprise – Add twists to your presentation to surprise your audience, thereby
making your speech entertaining.

Sample Illustration 2

A sample “roast.”

He won’t even pick me up in New York City on his way down from Boston to Pennsylvania. It’s
freaking 15 minutes out of his way on a 6-hour trip. He just got engaged after 3 years of dating his
fiancée… Congratulations! Or as my Grandmom said, “What took you so long???” But, THANK
YOU BRETT! It’s about time you took some of the pressure off me. Grandmom says, “Did you set
a date yet? You know, Grandpop didn’t get that new hip for nothing.”

So, now he has a real reason not to pick me up. No matter when he’s going home, it’s always
something – one time it was the neighborhood I was in, then the car was “acting” up, he gets more
inheritance by showing up first, there was a bomb in Boston – as if that would’ve stopped him
years ago! Do you remember who drove you to college, you …………? Last time he couldn’t pick
me up it was something about eczema or psoriasis. If that’s true his fiancée must be contaminated
all over. It’s not like I’m going to kiss him or hug him

https://thecomedyconsultant.com/jokes/roasts/

PERSUASIVE SPEECH

It is a specific type of speech in which the speaker aims to convince the audience to accept
their perspective. The primary goal is to influence the thoughts, feelings, actions, and
behavior or attitude of the listeners (Gamble & Gamble, 2012). It seeks to provide the
audience with clear or acceptable ideas that can influence their opinions and decisions. This
type of speech seeks to change their perception and convince them that your argument is
important, practical, attainable, or feasible.

Categories of persuasive speech

 1. Preposition of Fact- It is speech that claims something is true or false. This type
requires reliable evidence supported by a study.
2. Preposition of Value- It is speech that proves an idea in terms of the speaker’s sense
of values and wrong or right.
3. Preposition of Policy- It is speech that recommends action or changes.

Forms of Appeal (Proof)

1. Appeal to Reason (Logos)

The argument should appeal to the rational intellect by finding common ground to
thoroughly understand the topics. The speaker presents facts and statistics to support the
argument.

2. Appeal to Emotion (Pathos)

The argument should anticipate the ethical, religious, social, and political beliefs and the
feelings of the audience. The speaker invokes sympathy by making the audience feel a
certain way.

3. Appeal to Character (Ethos)

The argument should appeal to the sense of right and wrong, justice, and fair play. The
credibility of the speaker gives authority to the claims.

Qualities of an Effective Persuasive Speech:

1. Having an attention-grabbing introduction

2. Authority to speak (credibility and competence)
3. Logical presentation
4. Smart pacing
5. Stirring conclusion

Sample Illustration 3

This speech was delivered as the commencement address to the graduates of Stanford University
on June 12, 2005.

Speech Transcript

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the
world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a
college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just
three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for
another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student,
and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by
college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.
Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my
parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an
unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later
found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never
graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few
months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive
as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition.
After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and
no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money
my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out
OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and
begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I
returned Coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across
town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And
much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless
later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.
Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand
calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to
take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces,
about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great
typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t
capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we
were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into
the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that
single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally
spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would
have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class,
and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was
impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear
looking backward 10 years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.
So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in
something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it
has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’
garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us
in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We had just released our finest
creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How
can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I
thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went
well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When
we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had
been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of
entrepreneurs down — that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with
David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very
public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly
began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that
one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could
have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of
being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative
periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and
fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the
world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation
studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and
the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene
and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful
tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick.
Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.
You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your
work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what
you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t
found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find
it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep
looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last,
someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past
33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day
of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been
“No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me
make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all
fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only
what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the
trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to
follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly
showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me
this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no
longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order,
which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought
you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is
buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an
endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my
pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me
that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned
out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and
I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more
decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when
death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet
death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be,
because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out
the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now,
you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite
true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma —
which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions
drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and
intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is
secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was
one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from
here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s,
before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors
and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came
along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run
its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover
of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find
yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay
Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have
always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches.