CHAPTER 8
●Good speeches contain relevant, motivating, and audience-centered Supporting material
in the form of examples, narratives, testimony, facts, and statistics
○Essential building blocks
○Arouses the audience’s interest
○Illustrates and elaborates upon your ideas
○Provides the audience with evidence or proof for your arguments
●Use a Variety of Supporting Materials
○Listeners respond most favorably to a variety of materials derived from multiple sources to illustrate each main point
●Consider the Target Audience
○Depending on how the audience feels about a subject, it may be better to use Testimony: facts and expert opinions, rather than personal stories and examples.
○Not every source is appropriate for every audience (bias--no liberal sources for a conservative audience)
●Offer Examples
○Example: a typical instance; a fact, incident, quotation that illustrates a general principle, rule, state of things.
○Don’t get lost in a sea of abstract statements
○Brief Examples
■Offer a single illustration of a point
○Extended Examples
■Offer multifaceted illustrations of the idea, item, or event being described, thereby allowing the speaker to create a more detailed picture for the audience
○Hypothetical examples
■Used to make a point about something that could happen in the future if certain things occurred--what you believe the outcome will be
●Share Stories
○One of the most powerful means of conveying a message and connecting with an audience
○Narratives: tell tales, both real and imaginary, about practically anything under the sun.
■Plot, character, setting, and timeline
○There is a universal appeal of stories
○Personal narratives are stories we tell about ourselves
○Third-person narratives are stories that we tell about others
○Anecdotes: brief stories of meaningful and entertaining incidents based on real life, often the speaker’s own.
■Draw in an audience, command attention, persuade/reinforce thief view of
the speaker
■Contain moral--the lesson the speaker wants to convey
●Draw on Testimony
○Testimony: is firsthand findings, eyewitness accounts, and people's opinions ○Expert Testimony: includes testimony by professionals trained to evaluate a given topic
○Lay Testimony: testimony by nonexperts such as eyewitnesses, which reveals compelling firsthand information that may be unavailable to others.
○Credibility plays a key role in testimony
●Provide Facts and Statistics
○Facts are documented occurrences, truly only facts when they have been independently verified by people other than the source.
○Use Statistics Selectively
■Statistics are quantified evidence that summarizes, compares, and predicts things; clarify complex information and help make abstract concepts or ideas concrete
■Choose a few rather than many that make your message more compelling
○Use Statistics Accurately
■Use Frequencies to indicate counts
●A Frequency is simply a count of the number of times something occurs; indicate size, describe trends, or help listeners understand
comparisons between two or more categories
■Use percentages to express proportion
●Express similarity or difference in magnitude between things (comparisons)
●Defined as the quantified portion of a whole
■Use Types of Averages Accurately
●An Average: describes information according to its typical characteristics
○Present Statistics Ethically
■Use only reliable sources
■Present Statistics in context (method, when, and scope)
■Avoid confusing statistics with absolute truth
■Orally refer to your sources
■Avoid cherry-picking
●Selectively presenting only those statistics that buttress your POV while ignoring competing data
●Popular of politicians
○Use Visual Aids Whenever Possible
●Win Acceptance of your Supporting Materials
○Establish credibility of sources
○Alert listeners to the sources’ qualifications
CHAPTER 9
●Invention: the search for supporting material
●Assess Your Research Needs
○What do you need to elaborate upon?
