Public Speaking Basics

The informative speech is required in every speech class. It's a challenging assignment, so I thought it might be helpful to provide a sample speech with some related files. I've included a sample informative speech, delivered via YouTube along with a sample outline. Sometimes, you just need to see a finished product to help you get started - so here they are: Informative Speech Example Hopefully this helps! What Makes a President Thesis Statement: Thomas Jefferson’s influence was born out of a great love of nature, knowledge and the world Introduction: I. (Attention Getter) “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness (US 1776).” II. (Introduce Topic) You may recognize these powerful words from the Declaration of Independence, which was written by Thomas Jefferson. III. (R...

I enjoy my job, generally speaking. Much of my time is spent listening to students speaking  about the things that matter to them. In all, I’ve sat through thousands of student speeches. If I’m lucky, the speeches are interesting and intriguing. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. I’ve noticed this particularly when it comes to informative speech topics. Too many informative speech topics are redundant, unspecified, insignificant, or irrelevant to most of the audience members. I have strong feelings about this as someone who’s had to listen to countless hours of these speeches. A poor informative speech topic wastes everybody’s time. I’ve singled out three in particular that keep coming up in my classes. Each of these demonstrate common pitfalls when it comes to selecting an informative speech topic. I’ll try to explain why each topic doesn’t work well in addition to providing some alternative suggestions. Here are my three least desirable informative sp...