Organizing Your Main ideas 9.1 187
Purpose statement: At the end of my speech, the audience will be able
to list the steps required to clean up a broken CFL.
Central idea: Cleaning up a broken CFL requires four steps.
Main ideas: I. With the air conditioner turned off, allow the
room to air out for 15 minutes.
II. Collect all the light bulb fragments with dis-
posable gloves or a stiff piece of cardboard.
III. Wipe up any remaining debris with damp
paper towels or sticky tape.
IV. Dispose of fragments and clean-up materials
in a sealed container.^4Backward in time In another chronologically organized speech, this one
discussing the development of YouTube, the speaker wanted to emphasize the
inauspicious origins of the popular video site. Therefore, she organized the
speech backward in time:
Purpose statement: At the end of my speech, the audience will be able
to describe YouTube’s rapid rise from humble
beginnings.
Central idea: The popular video site YouTube grew rapidly
from humble beginnings.
Main ideas: I. January 2012: YouTube exceeds 4 billion
viewers a day.
II. November 2006: YouTube acquired by Google
III. December 2005: YouTube site publicly
launched
IV. February 2005: YouTube founded in a garage
in Menlo Park, California^5
Chronological organization, then, involves either forward or backward
progression, depending on which end of a set of events the speaker intends to
emphasize. The element that is common to both movements is that dates and
events are discussed in sequence rather than in random order.
Organizing Ideas Spatially
When you say “As you enter the room, the table is to your right, the easy chair
is to your left, and the kitchen door is straight ahead,” you are using spatial
organization: arranging ideas—usually natural divisions of the central idea—
according to their location or direction. It does not matter whether you prog-
ress up or down, east or west, forward or back, as long as you follow a logical
progression. If you skip up, down, over, and back, you will only confuse your
listeners rather than painting a distinct word picture.