168 8.3 GatherinG and UsinG sUpportinG Material
- Keep your descriptions and explanations brief. Too many details may make your
listeners say your speech was “everything I never wanted to know about the
subject.” - Use language that is as specific and concrete as possible. Vivid and specific lan-
guage helps you to hold the audience’s attention and paint in your listeners’
minds the image you are trying to communicate. Chapter 12 provides more
tips for making your language specific. - Avoid too much description and explanation. You can hold your audience’s
attention more effectively if you alternate explanations and descrip-
tions with other types of supporting material, such as brief examples or
statistics.
Definitions
Definitions, statements of what terms mean or how they are applied in specific
instances, have two justifiable uses in speeches. First, a speaker should be sure to
explain the meaning of any and all specialized, technical, or little-known terms
in his or her speech. Such definitions are usually achieved by classification, the
kind of definition you would find in a dictionary. Alternatively, a speaker may
define a term by showing how it works or how it is applied in a specific in-
stance—what is known as an operational definition.DEFINITIONS BY CLASSIFICATION A definition by classification places a
term in the general class, group, or family to which it belongs and differentiates
it from all the other members of that class. Student speaker Patrick defined the
term hydraulic fracturing as “a drilling technique” (the general class to which it
belongs), “which harnesses incredible amounts of natural gas, but at the cost of
destroying our most precious resource: our drinking water” (differentiation of
hydraulic fracturing from other drilling techniques).^14OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS Sometimes a word or phrase may be familiar
to an audience, but as a speaker, you may be applying it in a specific way that
needs to be clarified. In such cases, you might provide an operational definition,
explaining how something works or what it does.
In her speech on vitamin D deficiency, student speaker Nicole operationally
defined rickets for her audience:
Rickets leads to weakened bones that produce deformities such as
bowed legs and curvature of the spine, making for consistent and some-
times lifelong pain.^15
Both Nichole and Patrick in the preceding examples provided oral citations
of the sources in their definitions.USING DEFINITIONS EFFECTIVELY The following suggestions can help you
to use definitions more effectively in your speeches.