strategies to Maintain audience interest 15.4 331
This clever flight attendant took a predictable announcement and added a
few surprises and novel interpretations to make a boring but important message
interesting. With just a little thought about how to make your message less pre-
dictable, you can add zest and interest to your talks. Listeners will focus on the
unexpected. The sample informative speech in this chapter includes a surprise
in the introduction.
CHOOSING A SPEECH TOPIC
by Roger Fringer^15
Today I’d like to talk to you about [pause] tables. Tables are wood...
usually... and they are.... How often do we sit in a class and feel
the intelligence draining out of us? In a speech class, we are given the
opportunity to add to that feeling or to add to the intelligence. Selecting
a meaningful speech topic will make our speeches interesting, important,
as well as being informative. As students, we’ve all been in the situation
of being more anxious than necessary because we are talking about an
unfamiliar or uninteresting speech topic. In our public speaking class,
we spend a number of hours giving speeches and listening to them. If
we have four days of speeches, at what—seven speech topics—that
equals 28 hours spent listening to speeches. Let’s not forget that we are
paying to listen to those speeches. If our tuition is, say, $15,000 a year,
that’s $875 that we have spent listening to those 28 hours of speeches.
We work hard for our tuition, so we should spend it wisely. Spending it
wisely means we don’t waste our time. We don’t waste our own time on
preparing and giving the speeches, and we don’t waste our classmates’
time who have to listen to our speeches. The solution is simple if we take
choosing our topic seriously.
SAMPLE INFORMATIVE SPEECH
Roger cleverly captures
attention by purposefully
starting with an unimaginative
topic and using halting delivery
that makes listeners wonder,
“What’s this really about?”
Roger establishes a common
bond with his listeners by
relating to them as fellow
students who are often
confronted with the same
problem: how to select a topic
for a speech.
Rather than just saying that we
waste time and money when
listening to speeches, Roger
uses statistics specifically
adapted to the audience to
whom he is speaking; this
is a good example of being
audience-centered.
He clearly previews his major
ideas and links them together
by beginning each point with a
word that begins with I.Here, he uses a signpost by
clearly noting he’s moved to his
second point.I recommend that we choose topics following The Three I’s to
guide us. The first I is to make speeches interesting. By doing so, we
can alleviate the boredom that so often permeates the public speaking
classroom. If the topic is interesting to us, we will present it in a manner
that shows our interest. We will also keep our audience’s attention when
we know, as students, they can be thinking about a million other things.
Choosing an interesting topic will also alleviate some of the angst, anxiety
we feel while giving the speech topic.
The second I is to make the speech important. The speech should
not only be interesting but important to us. It should be relevant to our
lives now or in the future.
The third I is to make the speech informative. Let’s not waste our
tuition money by not learning anything new in those 28 hours of class
time. This is our opportunity to learn from each other’s experiences and
expertise.
Again, he uses a verbal signpost
to indicate that this is his third
point.(continued)