Chapter 15 Informative Speaking 447Effective quasi-scientific explanations highlight the main points with such
features as titles, organizing analogies, presentation aids, and signposts (“The first
key point is.. .”). Good quasi-scientific explanations also connect key points by
using transitional phrases (such as “for example”), connectives (“because”), and
diagrams depicting relationships among parts.
Challenging Intuition
Some ideas in explanatory speeches may run contrary to what intuition tells us.
Consider the polio vaccine, which was tested in 1952 and used an injected dose
of an inactive (essentially, dead) polio virus. The notion of using something that
makes people sick to prevent people from getting sick is counterintuitive. Imag-
ine how difficult this must have been to explain to patients and worried parents
at the time.
If you are giving an informative speech on how vaccines work or another
counterintuitive idea, you might want to design your talk around transforma-
tive explanations. Transformative explanations are designed to help speakers
transform “theories” about phenomena into more accepted notions. For your
speech on vaccines, you might describe how, by exposing the body to a similar
but benign virus (like the dead polio virus), a vaccine essentially teaches the body
to defend itself against a specific disease.
Guidelines for Informative Speeches
In Chapters 12 through 14, we provided the basics for developing, preparing,
writing, and delivering effective presentations. In this section, we’ll take a look at
how you can tailor those basic strategies to the needs of an informative speech.
Your first goal as a speaker is to get your audience interested in your topic. But
you’ll also want to make sure that your speech is easy to listen to. It’s hard to
inform people who are struggling to keep up with you—or wishing
they were somewhere else!
Create Information Hunger
Can you recall a teacher from your past who had the ability to get you
interested in a certain subject area? The same techniques work when
it comes to public speaking. You want to make your audience hun-
gry for the information you are going to present—get them excited
about, or at least interested in, your topic. As you consider a topic
for your informative speech, ask yourself, “How will this audience
benefit from this information?” If you can’t come up with a compel-
ling reason for each person to pay attention to what you say, you need
to rethink your topic. Several strategies help you create information
hunger, including arousing curiosity and working your topic.
Arouse People’s Curiosity
A few years ago, we watched a student inform the audience about
kimonos. A kimono is a long, loose Japanese robe with wide sleeves
traditionally worn with a broad sash as an outer garment. The speaker
KIMONOS are beautiful,
but you’ll still need to make
them relevant to your audi-
ence if you really want to
draw them in. Christian Kober/
Robert Harding/Newscom