Speaking to Inform

Explaining Complex Ideas

The ability to share complicated ideas across disciplines and professions has significant benefits.  A good informative speaker conveys accurate, clear, and interesting information to the audience and keeps them engaged in the topic. If information is inaccurate, incomplete, or unclear, it will be useless to the audience!

Before you present, know your purpose

You’re not going to be able to tell the audience everything about your topic in your presentation, so you’ll need to be selective.  Narrow your topic and focus on a specific goal, with your specific audience in mind. It is better to talk in detail about a smaller aspect than to try to tell everything. Prioritize information that enhances audience learning.

Ensure accuracy

Make sure that your information is current. Even if you know much about your topic or wrote a good paper on the topic in a previous course, verify your own accuracy and completeness. Most people understand that technology changes rapidly, so update your information often. The same applies to topics that on the surface seem to require less updating.  Contemporary research continues to offer offers new insights on all topics, including historical events, classic literature and art, or psychological theories. So, even with a topic that seems to be unchanging, carefully check your information to confirm that it is accurate and current.

Also note, you’re only as smart as your sources.  Any information you use in your presentation should come from sources you’ve checked for validity.

Know where to start

Adapt your message according to the listener’s background and knowledge. Don’t spend time with definitions that they do not need, but don’t confuse them with information they don’t understand. Fill in gaps in understanding by using relatable examples. When possible, ask your audience questions to check their understanding.

Make your speech personal. “I want to talk to you today about” is much more personal than saying, “I will explain how…”.

Don’t get “lost in the weeds” or “go too far down the rabbit hole”

Avoid overwhelming your audience with too much information. Focus on explaining a few key points clearly. Select the most significant aspects of your topic, and explain these by relating them to familiar concepts.

Stay focused on key ideas! If you overload your audience with information, they will be unable to follow your narrative. As you plan your presentation, carefully narrow your topic, and limit information to its most complete and coherent. Don’t go off on tangents or confuse your audience. Use definitions, descriptions, explanations, and examples you need to make your meanings clear, but don’t add tangential information merely because you find it interesting.

Prioritize Clarity

Keep your message clear and concise. Make a priority of giving your audience a basic understanding, rather than expanding on every intricate detail (Amorelli, 2019).

For your listeners to benefit from your speech, convey your ideas in a way that they can understand.  Organize your message in a logical, easy-to-follow way.

To present a clear and interesting speech, use descriptions, causal analysis, or categories. With description, use words to create a picture in your audience’s minds. Describe physical realities, social realities, emotional experiences, sequences, consequences, or contexts

Use words that your audience will understand and define terms that they may not know. Do not assume that something that’s obvious to you will also be obvious to your audience. Formulate your work with the objective of being understood in all details.  In a community lecture on wild edible plants in the Ozarks, the speaker said, “This plant has a cathartic effect” and “I like this for its astringent properties.” An audience member wasn’t sure what these terms meant, so she looked them up while he was talking, missing part of his lecture (Lynn Meade).

Emphasize why your topic is interesting and relevant

Share with your audience the reasons why you find the topic fascinating (Amorelli, 2019). Give them relevant, real-life examples that help them to connect the subject to their lives.

Your listeners will benefit the most if they can give sustained attention to the speech, and this won’t happen if they are bored.  Emphasize the ways your topic connects to your audience’s interests and curiosities. Suppose, for example, that you had a summer job as a veterinary assistant and learned a great deal about canine parasites. This topic might be very interesting to you, but how interesting will it be to others in your class? To make this topic interesting, find a way to connect it with the audience’s interests and curiosities. For instance, perhaps there are certain canine parasites that also pose risks to humans—this might be an interesting connection.

Always keep your audience members center stage. For instance, if your speech is about air pollution, ask your audience to imagine feeling their eyes and lungs burning from smog. This is a strategy for making the topic more real to them, since it may happen to them often; and even if it hasn’t, it easily could.

Being Ethical

Honesty and credibility must be the undergird to your presentation; otherwise, you betray your listeners’ trust. Therefore, if you choose a topic that turns out to be too difficult, you must decide what will serve your audience’s needs and interests. Shortcuts and oversimplifications are not the answer.

Being ethical often involves a surprising amount of work. In the case of choosing too ambitious a topic, you have some choices:

• Narrow your topic further.
• Narrow your topic in a different way.
• Reconsider your specific purpose.
• Start over with a new topic.

Your goal is to serve your audience’s interests and needs, whoever they are and whether you believe they already know something about your topic.

How do I add logos?

For informative speeches, focus on the rhetorical appeal, logos. The appeals as you recall are pathos, ethos, and logos. Logos is the logical appeal. An easy way to remember this is that logos starts with an “L” and so does logic. How can you use logos or appeal to logic inside your informative speech?

Ask yourself these questions to consider if you are using logos properly in your informative speech:

• Are you using statistics? If so, are you using them properly and making sure they are accurate?
• Are you stating facts that you have found through research, which are actually facts and not opinions?
• Are you explaining your ideas in a logical manner? Is your audience able to follow what you are saying?
• Are you using sound reasoning as you explain facts and statistics to your audience?
• Are you using definitions in the speech? If so, are they accurate?
• Are you thinking of the audience as a reasonable and logical group of individuals?
• Are you appealing to logic in your speech by using examples, statistics, facts, definitions, and explanations?
• Are you logically arranging and organizing ideas?
• Is your speech easy to understand? Will the audience understand your speech’s main points?

You must answer yes to most of these questions for any research-based and informative speech. And remember, do not forget to also add pathos and ethos to your speech as well.

Sharing Research and Engaging Audiences

Kang Lee presents his research, dispelling common beliefs about children and lying.  Notice the ways he engages his listeners throughout, using several strategies:

Engaging Opening:

• Lee initiates audience involvement by posing a reflective question about childhood honesty, immediately engaging listeners.

Humour:

• Throughout the talk, humor is skillfully integrated, with Lee making lighthearted comments about audience honesty and sharing entertaining anecdotes.

Storytelling:

• Lee incorporates storytelling by narrating an anecdote about Mr. Richard Messina, an elementary school principal, effectively illustrating prevailing beliefs about children and lying.

Use of Visuals:

• The presentation includes impactful visuals, including videos of children responding to questions, enhancing the audience’s understanding of the speaker’s points.

Interactive Element:

• Audience participation is facilitated through video analysis, where attendees are asked to discern which child is lying, adding an interactive dimension to the presentation.

Rhetorical Questions:

• Strategic use of rhetorical questions stimulates audience thinking and engagement, fostering a more dynamic interaction.

Statistics and Research Findings:

• Credibility is bolstered through the integration of statistics and research findings, such as percentages of children lying at different ages.

Contrast and Surprise:

• Lee challenges conventional beliefs about children and lying, revealing surprising research findings to capture and maintain the audience’s attention.

Repetition for Emphasis:

• Key points are reinforced through repetition, emphasizing the importance of certain concepts throughout the talk.

Application of Findings:

• Lee discusses real-world applications of lie-detection technology, highlighting its relevance in education, healthcare, and politics.

Call to Action:

• The talk concludes with a compelling call to action, prompting the audience to reflect on the broader implications of the presented technology and its potential impact on various aspects of life.

Attribution & References

Except where otherwise noted, this chapter is adapted from “Chapter 12: Informative Speaking” In Public Speaking by Sarah Billington and Shirene McKay, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. / A derivative of “Informative Speaking” In Stand up, Speak out: The Practice and Ethics of Public Speaking by University of Minnesota, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Small portions are adapted from “Informative Speech” In Advanced Public Speaking by Lynn Meade, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

References

Amorelli, J. (2019, Nov 19). How to explain anything to anyone. 4 steps to clearer communication. TED. https://ideas.ted.com/how-to-explain-anything-to-anyone-4-steps-to-clearer-communication