CHAPTER 9: BUILDING A TOPICMike Harris - Communications

SPEECH PURPOSES:Speech to Entertain

Speech to Inform

Speech to Persuade

Overlapping Purposes

SPEECH TO ENTERTAIN

• A speech that tries to gain and keep the audiences attention

• Success if the audience enjoys itself

• Not always humorous – frightening or unusual

• Most common type: Humorous Speech• Not a comedy routine• Colorful stories and jokes• Light and amusing• After dinner speech• Roasts – ironic remarks about a guest of honor

SPEECH TO INFORM

• Audience learns about a NEW subject or learns NEW information about a familiar subject by providing interesting, useful, and unique information to your audience

• Must be audience appropriate for level of understanding - adaptation

• Must thoroughly research and understand your topic

• Must be clearly organized to be effective

• Must be practiced and enthusiastic

• Must use a dynamic style of delivery

• Dedicate yourself to these goals and you will be successful!!!

MAJOR TYPES OF INFORMATIVE SPEECHES

• Objects

• Processes (demonstration)

• Events

• Concepts

• People

• These categories are not absolute, but provide a solid foundation from brainstorming your topic

SPEECHES ABOUT OBJECTS

• Speeches that focus on things in the existing world – Animals, places, products, groups, etc…• Time constraints must be considered as you can’t talk about a

topic in it’s entirety – limit your speech to a focused discussion (that’s what the outline is for…)

SPEECHES ABOUT PROCESSES

• Focus on patterns of action• Demonstration speeches fall in this category• Utilize these speeches to explain topic on broader terms than

just the process at hand• Make sure to limit your discussion t information you can

explain clearly within time constraints

SPEECHES ABOUT EVENTS

• Speeches that focus on things that have happened, are happening, or will happen• Relate the event descriptively to your audience• Adapt the information presented to best suit your audience• Limit your speech to aspects of an event that can adequately

be discussed within time constraints

SPEECHES ABOUT CONCEPTS

• Speeches that focus on beliefs, ideas, and theories

• As opposed to other informative speeches that are ”concrete”, this type of speech is much more abstract

• Must be clear in creating an understandable meaning and presenting your topic

• These speeches sometimes take on a persuasive tone

• Focus on providing unbiased information and refrain from making arguments

• Beware of concepts that can be vague and involved – limit your speech to things that can be easily explained

• The narrative and imagery of suffering and oppression that is often presented is filtered through the lens of the body – this grabs your attention as a spectacle that distracts from a concrete analysis of structural causes of racial violence

• Kilby 13 – prof @ university of salford

• (Jane, The visual fix: The seductive beauty of images of violence, European Journal of Social Theory 16(3) 326–341)

• Part of problem with the Daniel’s image is its archival status, which renders the violence of racist lynching an anachronism, thus making it difficult to connect it to the violence of racism today. This, however, is only part of problem, and one that could be remedied by the use of other images such as Michael Donald’s. The problem more precisely is that the power of such images turns on the sight of the dead and suffering body, as do 10 of the 12 images included in the anthology. Indeed, strictly there are no images of violence, but images of the body bearing the consequences of violence. This is obvious (although often occluded: the photographs that shocked Sontag were most likely images of piles of corpses, not of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau per se), but its significance is not, and it is the aim of this article to make clearer why we should be suspicious of images of the brutalized body.¶ As already noted, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois do not completely ignore the questions prompted by the use of images of suffering. Indeed, they acknowledge how easily they can compromise and subvert ‘the project of witnessing, critiquing, and writing against violence, injustice, and suffering’ to which the anthology is dedicated (p. 1). On the one hand, that is, they express an anxiety concerning the ways that ‘naive’ fieldworkers can fall prey to delusions of political activist grandeur or becoming pornographers of vio- lence. ‘Here,’ they argue ‘we are thinking of Clifford Geertz’s insightful critique of the privilege of the first-world ethnographic authority . . . and, by analogy, of the images of the AIDS sufferer that Benetton used on billboards to advertise their line of clothing’ (p. 26). While, on the other hand, if perhaps in a manner logically at odds with the notion of the pornography of violence, they argue that their years of witnessing violence have taught them that the more people see images of suffering and death, the greater the images’ invisibility. ‘Shock reactions to blood and violence are readily extinguished’, they write, with people everywhere having ‘an enormous capacity to absorb the hideous and go on with life and business as usual’ (p. 26).¶ This way of framing the debate over images of suffering is typical, but also problematic on two related counts (aside, that is, from the already noted contradiction). First, how do we know that people everywhere have an enormous capacity to absorb the shock of images of horror? What evidence is there to suggest that images of horror feed a specifically pornographic appetite? Measuring the impact of images of violence is very difficult, as decades of media research into the impact of violent images prove; and as Carolyn J. Dean (2004: 20) argues, pornography – as the term adopted to explain our seemingly prurient interest in images of suffering – ‘appears to mean so much and yet its meaning is so hard to pin down’: pornography, she concludes ‘seems elegantly to account for the exhaustion of empathy, and yet turns out not to explain anything at all’. Thus, while Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois name the problem of the consumption of images of suffering as pornography, for example, Bourgois worries that his ethnographic depiction of Puerto Rican crack dealers might contribute to ‘‘‘a pornography of violence’’ that submerges the structural causes of urban destitution under lurid details of blood, aggression and gore’ (2004: 427), there is no attempt to clarify who revels in the detail, when, where, how and why. There is simply an assumption that we know to what he is referring. This is not to deny that there is a problem, but to query whether the term pornography aids our understanding. As Dean (2004: 42) concludes, it is time to either abandon it, or interrogate it in great depth.

• This type of performance turns black suffering into a spectacle, something to be easily packaged up and consumed by the white privilieged as part of the libidinal economy of slavery where the masters derive enjoyment from portrayals of suffering. this is performing before the master, which fixes and naturalizes the conditions of pained embodiment.

SPEECH TO PERSUADE

• A speech intending to change the audience attitudes or beliefs

• Most challenging type of speech• Sometimes controversial subjects

• Informal Persuasive• Convincing parents, teachers, or employers

• Formal Persuasive• Salepeople• Business or class presentations• Political speeches• Religious speeches

OVERLAPPING PURPOSES/HIDDEN AGENDA

• Comprised of different facets from some or all categories of speech to fill one common purpose

• Controlling purpose – primary or most important component of the speech

• Examples:• Political speech• Rally support for new program

• Sometimes message isn’t obvious – • Subliminal messaging• Children’s programs• Metaphors

TOPIC SELECTIONSuiting Yourself

Suiting Your Audience

Suiting the Occasion

SUITING YOURSELF

• If you’re not interested in the subject, your audience won’t be• Requires a thorough knowledge of the subject• Effect of the speech is based on the audiences (teachers)

perception of your expertise, good intentions, credibility, and trustworthiness• Always choose a topic that reflects what you know and enjoy!

SUITING YOUR AUDIENCE

• First consideration in choosing a topic is the audience needs• Narrow your topic based on what the audience would most

want to hear• Choose a topic based on things that will interest your

audience• Consider the groups knowledge of your subject when writing

your speech• Avoid using information your audience already knows

SUITING THE OCCASION

• An occasion is a specific event within the situation• Topic must suit the occasion• Use common sense• Mr. Harris’ rule -• When in doubt about the content of your speech, don’t do it!

STRATEGIES FOR CHOOSING YOUR TOPIC

• Think about your interests

• Pick a topic with intellectual merit, originality, and the potential to entertain

• Research and learn about unfamiliar topics you are interested in• Challenge yourself to help others learn to understand it• Examples: Explore an unfamiliar religion, research areas outside of your comfort

zone, examine the opposing view

• Think about previous classes you’ve had• Think about concepts covered that interested you and are unique, interesting, and

enlightening

• Talk to others• Classmates, friends, and family• Helps stimulate ideas when you feel stuck

THESIS STATEMENTS

FRAMING A THESIS• The point of your topic narrowed to a single sentence that is a statement,

not a question

• Thesis statements states your positions precisely and summarizes your position• Audience expects a thesis• Helps the audience follow your ideas – makes a connection between points• Helps the audience listen properly and critically• Shapes your audiences expectations of your content

• Purpose of a thesis should be clear, concise, and easy to remember (repeatable)– deliver it to the audience and make it stand out

• Allows you to narrow your topic and focus your research to a specific area

• Avoid being to basic and trivial, but also too technical or complex

• Use concrete terms that clearly establish the focus of your speech

EXAMPLES:

Generating InterestDull thesis- You can learn a lot from looking at peoples trash

Interesting thesis –“Garbagology”, the close examination of peoples trash, is an unusual means of learning about the lives of people, both past and preseny

Being PreciseImprecise –Taking pictures of people is hard

Precise – Because capturing a person’s character on film is so difficult, portrait photography requires a great deal of training

Being ConciseWordy –In my opinion, some of the television shows that kids watch, like cartoons on Sunday mornings from 8:00 in the morning till noon, aren’t nearly as good as the cartoons we used to watch when we were kids and would get up real early and turn on the TV and stele down with a bowl of cereal to watch Bugs Bunny and Scooby Doo

Concise – Current Saturday morning cartoons simply aren’t as imaginative as the cartoons we watched as children