Public Speaking

Unit 1: Why Public Speaking Matters Today:

○ Getting your message across to others effectively requires attention to
message content, skill in communicating content, and your passion for the
information presented.
○ People have many reasons for engaging in public speaking, but the skills
necessary for public speaking are applicable whether someone is speaking
for informative, persuasive, or entertainment reasons.
○ When preparing a speech, it is important to think about the ethics of public
speaking from the beginning. When a speaker sets out to be ethical in his or
her speech from the beginning, arriving at ethical speech is much easier.

Unit 2: Speaking Confidently:

● Communication apprehension refers to the fear or anxiety people experience at the
thought of being evaluated by others. Some anxiety is a normal part of the
communication process.
● Communication apprehension stems from many sources, including the speaker’s
personality characteristics, communication context, nature of the audience, or
situation.
● There are many steps you can take during the speech preparation process to
manage your communication apprehension, including thinking positively, analyzing
your audience, clearly organizing your ideas, adapting your language to the oral
mode, and practicing.
● Plan ahead for how to cope with unexpected difficulties such as forgetting part of
your speech content, having technical trouble with visual aids, or being interrupted by
external distractions.

Unit 3: The Importance of Listening

● Understand the differences between listening and hearing.
● Hearing is the physiological process of attending to sound within one’s environment;
listening, however, is a focused, concentrated approach to understanding the
message a source is sending.
● Learning how to be an effective listener has numerous advantages. First, effective
listening can help you become a better student. Second, effective listening can help
you become more effective in your interpersonal relationships. Third, effective
listening can lead others to perceive you as more intelligent. Lastly, effective listening
can help you become a stronger public speaker.
● All audiences have a limited attention span. As a speaker, you must realize how long
you can reasonably expect an audience to listen to your message.
● The receiving stage of listening is the basic stage where an individual hears a
message being sent by a speaker.
Unit 4: Audience Analysis
● Audience analysis should be conducted so you can acknowledge your audience and
their beliefs, knowledge, and attitudes.
● Demographic audience analysis focuses on group memberships of audience
members.
● Another element of audience is psychographic information, which focuses on
audience attitudes, beliefs, and values.
● Situational analysis of the occasion, physical setting, and other factors are also
critical to effective audience analysis.
● Several options exist for learning about your audience, including direct observation,
interviews, surveys, focus groups, and using existing research about your audience.
● You can use your audience analysis to provide you further information about what
types of content would be appropriate and meaningful for your specific audience.

Unit 5: Finding a Purpose and Selecting a Topic:

Selecting a topic is a process. We often start by selecting a broad area of knowledge and
then narrowing the topic to one that is manageable for a given rhetorical situation.
● Conducting a personal inventory is a good way to start the topic selection process.
When we analyze our own experiences, interests, knowledge, and passions, we
often find topics that others will also find interesting and useful.
● Conducting a personal inventory is a good way to start the topic selection process.
When we analyze our own experiences, interests, knowledge, and passions, we
often find topics that others will also find interesting and useful.
● Moving from a general to specific purpose requires you to identify the who, what,
when, where, and why of your speech.
● State your specific purpose in a sentence that includes the general purpose, a
description of the intended audience, and a prepositional phrase summarizing the
topic.

Unit 6: Researching Your Speech

● Research is a fascinating and fun process because it allows us to find answers to
questions, it exposes us to new ideas, and it can lead us to pursue new activities.
● Primary and secondary sources are quite common in research literature. Primary
research is where the author has conducted the research him or herself and
secondary research is when an author reports on research conducted by others.
● In conducting research for a speech, commit adequate time and plan your schedule.
Consider both the research time, or time spent gathering information, and the
preparation time needed to organize and practice your speech.
● Style focuses on the components of your speech that make up the form of your
expression rather than your content.

Unit 7: Supporting Ideas and Building Arguments

● Speakers often use facts and statistics to reinforce or demonstrate information.
Unfortunately, many speakers and audience members do not have a strong
 mathematical background, so it is important to understand the statistics used and
communicate this information to the audience.
● Types of Examples: Brief, Extended, and Hypothetical
Brief, extended, and hypothetical examples can be used to help an audience better
understand and relate to key points of a presentation.
● Storytelling points toward a single goal and, ideally, deepens our understanding of
who we are as human beings. Your story should not be forced, but should come
across as a natural part of your speech. If your audience thinks you're telling a story
just because you read that it was a good idea to do so, your story won't work.
● Systematically think through the support you have accumulated through your
research. Examine the accumulated support to ensure that a variety of forms of
support are used. Choose appropriate forms of support depending on the speech
context or audience.

Unit 8: The Body of a Speech

● Speakers can use a variety of different organizational patterns, including
categorical/topical, comparison/contrast, spatial, chronological, biographical, causal,
problem-cause-solution, and psychological. Ultimately, speakers must really think
about which organizational pattern best suits a specific speech topic.
● Speakers can use a variety of different organizational patterns, including
categorical/topical, comparison/contrast, spatial, chronological, biographical, causal,
problem-cause-solution, and psychological. Ultimately, speakers must really think
about which organizational pattern best suits a specific speech topic.
● The needs, interests, and expertise of the audience should be the central
consideration in choosing main points.
● Transitions are very important because they help an audience stay on top of the
information that is being presented to them. Without transitions, audiences are often
left lost and the ultimate goal of the speech is not accomplished.

Unit 9: Introductions and Conclusions

● Introductions are only 10–15 percent of one’s speech, so speakers need to make
sure they think through the entire introduction to ensure that they will capture an
audience.
● Linking the attention-getter to the speech topic is essential so that you maintain
audience attention and so that the relevance of the attention-getter is clear to your
audience.
● In developing the introduction to your speech, begin by deciding upon a statement to
capture the audience’s attention.
● An effective conclusion contains three basic parts: a restatement of the speech’s
thesis; a review of the main points discussed within the speech; and a concluding
device that helps create a lasting image in audiences’ minds.
● Miller (1946) found that speakers tend to use one of ten concluding devices. All of
these devices are not appropriate for all speeches, so speakers need to determine
which concluding device would have the strongest, most powerful effect for a given
audience, purpose, and occasion.
Unit 10: Outlining
● Your outline can help you stay focused on the thesis of your presentation as you
prepare your presentation by testing the scope of your content, examining logical
relationships between topics, and checking the relevance of supporting ideas.
● For an outline to be useful, it’s important to follow five basic principles: singularity,
consistency, adequacy, uniformity, and parallelism.
● Working outlines help you with speech logic, development, and planning.
● The full-sentence outline develops the full detail of the message.
● The speaking outline helps you stay organized in front of the audience without
reading to them.

Unit 11: The Importance of Language

● Language is important in every aspect of our lives because it allows people to
communicate in a manner that enables the sharing of common ideas.
● Oral language is designed to be listened to and to sound conversational, which
means that word choice must be simpler, more informal, and more repetitive. Written
language uses a larger vocabulary and is more formal.
● Using appropriate language means that a speaker’s language is suitable or fitting for
themselves, as the speaker; our audience; the speaking context; and the speech
itself.
● Vivid language helps listeners create mental images. It involves both imagery (e.g.,
concreteness, simile, and metaphor) and rhythm (e.g., parallelism, repetition,
alliteration, and assonance).
● Public speakers need to make sure that they are very aware of their language. Six
common language issues that impact public speakers are clarity, economy,
obscenity, obscure language/jargon, power, and variety.

Unit 12: Delivering the Speech

● There are four main kinds of speech delivery: impromptu, extemporaneous,
manuscript, and memorized.
● Not every speaking setting happens in a classroom. As such, different environments
call for speakers to think through their basic speaking strategies.
● Good notecards keep you from reading to your audience.
● Good notecards are carefully based on key words and phrases to promote recall.
● Good notecards should enhance your relationship with listeners.
● Conversational style is a speaker’s ability to sound expressive while being perceived
by the audience as natural. Conversational quality is a speaker’s ability to prepare a
speech and rehearse a speech but still sound spontaneous when delivering it

Unit 13: Presentation Aids: Design and Usage

● Presentation aids should help audiences more thoroughly understand a speaker’s
basic message.
● There are four basic reasons to use presentation aids. First, they increase audience
understanding of a speaker’s message. Second, they help audiences retain and
recall a speaker’s message after the fact. Third, they make a speech more interesting
by adding variety. Lastly, by making a speaker’s overall speech more polished,
presentation aids can increase an audience’s perception of the speaker’s credibility.
 ● Various types of charts can aid audience understanding of a speaker’s message.
Statistical charts help audiences see and interpret numerical information.
Sequence-of-steps charts show how a process occurs. Decision trees help audience
members see how a specific decision can be made in a logical fashion.
● Line graphs, bar graphs, and pie graphs are commonly used by speakers to help
present numerical information. The information presented on a graph should be clean
and easily understandable from a distance.
● Speakers in professional contexts are expected to be familiar with presentation
software, such as PowerPoint.

Unit 14: Speaking to Inform and Entertain

● One important reason for informative speaking is to provide listeners with information
so that they can make up their own minds about an issue.
● Informative speeches must be accurate, clear, and interesting for the listener.
● A variety of different topic categories are available for informative speaking.
● One way to develop your topic is to focus on areas that might be confusing to the
audience. If the audience is likely to be confused about language or a concept, an
elucidating explanation might be helpful. If a process is complex, a quasi-scientific
explanation may help. If the audience already has an erroneous implicit idea of how
something works then a transformative explanation might be needed.
● There are eight common forms of ceremonial speaking: introduction, presentation,
acceptance, dedication, toast, roast, eulogy, and farewell.
● Inspirational speeches fall into two categories: goodwill (e.g., public relations,
justification, and apology) and speeches of commencement.
● Keynote speeches are delivered to set the underlying tone and summarize the core
message of an event.

Unit 15: Persuasive Speaking

● Persuasion is the use of verbal and nonverbal messages to get a person to behave
in a manner or embrace a point of view related to values, attitudes, and beliefs that
he or she would not have done otherwise. Studying persuasion is important today
because it helps us become more persuasive individuals, become more observant of
others’ persuasive attempts, and have a more complete understanding of the world
around us.
● There are four types of persuasive claims. Definition claims argue the denotation or
classification of what something is. Factual claims argue the truth or falsity about an
assertion being made. Policy claims argue the nature of a problem and the solution
that should be taken. Lastly, value claims argue a judgment about something (e.g.,
it’s good or bad, it’s right or wrong, it’s beautiful or ugly, moral or immoral).
● There are three common patterns that persuaders can utilize to help organize their
speeches effectively: Monroe’s motivated sequence, problem-cause-solution, and
comparative advantage. Each of these patterns can effectively help a speaker think
through his or her thoughts and organize them in a manner that will be more likely to
persuade an audience.

Learning Outcomes:
1. Helps establish rapport with your audience
2. Helps learn Public Speaking techniques to reduce nervousness and fear
 3. Helps understand your Public Speaking strengths as a presenter and how to appeal
to different types of people
4. Helps recognize how visual aids can create impact and attention in Public Speaking
5. Helps develop Public Speaking techniques to create a professional presence
6. Helps learn some different ways to prepare and organize information
7. Helps Prepare, practice, and deliver a short presentation
8. Helps improve your speaking skills,

Conclusion
In summary, effective public speaking is a skill that can greatly enhance your ability to
communicate, influence, and connect with others. By focusing on key elements like
preparation, delivery, and audience engagement, you can become a more confident and
compelling speaker. Remember, practice makes perfect, so keep honing your skills and don't
be afraid to embrace opportunities to speak in public. With dedication and perseverance, you
can become a more impactful communicator and achieve your goals. Thank you for your
attention today, and I encourage you to apply these principles to your future speaking
endeavors.