We all know the frustration of getting lost while someone else is speaking. When a speaker meanders, it is exhausting to figure out what their point is, where they are in the speech, or how one idea relates to another. You might even give up listening, start thinking about something else, or discreetly turn to your cell phone.

These frustrations point to the importance of organization, which you learned in chapter 1 refers to how a speaker orders the points in a speech and verbally connects those elements so their audience can follow. Inexperienced or ineffective public speakers may believe that once they select and research a topic, the speech-writing process will flow naturally. On the contrary! Skilled speakers know that selecting and organizing speech content requires time and critical thinking. We will begin by discussing the purpose and goals of organization and then turn to the foundational element of organization: thesis statements.

Box 12.1 Organization as an Ancient Art

Since ancient times, scholars and practitioners of public speaking have classified, studied, and practiced methods of organization. During the fourth century BCE, for example, Aristotle recognized that speakers who wish to capture and hold an audience’s attention must think about how to arrange and connect their content. This and the following two chapters draw on their wisdom so you may apply it to your contemporary speech topics.

 

 

The Purpose of Organization

The ultimate purposes of organization are to serve your audience’s needs and to inspire them to become civically engaged. When we refer to the audience in this chapter, we are talking about your direct audience. In chapter 10, we defined the direct audience as the people who are exposed to and attend to your speech. The needs of your audience, who are giving you their time and attention, should motivate you to thoughtfully organize your speech. Clearly presenting complex or unfamiliar issues enables your audience to better think through pressing public concerns.

But how do you know when your speech is well organized? We’ll next explain the four goals a speech fulfills when it is well organized. Afterward, we’ll consider how organizing your speech can help you tighten and hone your ideas.

Four Goals of a Well-Organized Speech

There are at least four goals for a well-organized speech: make the speech easy to follow, coherent, engaging, and well timed. You might think of these as benefits—for you as a speaker and for the audience—when accomplished.

Easy to Follow

The first goal is to make the speech easy to follow. Audiences should be able to easily identify the thesis and distinguish the speech’s major elements—often an introduction, main points, and conclusion. Instead of laboring to figure out where you are in a speech, your audience should be able to focus on your ideas instead. A well-organized speech also gives the speaker confidence; you can more easily remember the main points because each is clear and distinct. Thus, you can focus your energy on delivering the ideas, which allows you to give a more fluent and compelling presentation.

Coherent

Second, a well-organized speech should cohere as a presentation. That is, effective structure should draw connections between ideas. Major speech elements should flow logically from one part to the next. The audience should easily understand how the main points support or lead to the thesis. Speech content coheres when it makes sense together and leads to a compelling conclusion. Furthermore, a well-organized speech improves the case you are making. If listeners can easily see the connections between ideas, they may find your line of reasoning more convincing.

Engaging

Third, an organized speech is more engaging because it’s more interesting and memorable for the audience. A cleverly structured speech can offer the audience a new and interesting way of approaching an issue or understanding the merits of a particular approach or solution. Similarly, taking time to carefully craft your introduction and conclusion can effectively draw your audience in with a desire to learn more.

Box 12.2 Using Organization to Make Your Speech More Engaging

Imagine advocating for a food pantry to be built on your campus for students. How might you organize your speech? You could name three benefits it will provide: easy accessibility, free food, and recognition of many students’ financial pressures. That might be easy to follow but rather boring.

Alternatively, that same topic could be organized by first establishing the prominence of anxiety and depression among college students. Next you could identify hunger caused by food insecurity as a contributing factor to students’ anxiety and depression. Following that you might offer your solution of an on-campus food pantry. This three-point structure could more effectively intrigue the audience by drawing attention to the connections between food insecurity and mental health challenges.

When a speech’s organization is interesting, it is also typically memorable. An audience member may report after listening to your speech, “She first explained the problem, then identified a cause of the problem, and advocated for her preferred solution.” Or “He started by sharing his own family’s struggles with food insecurity, which immediately drew me into the speech.” A well-organized speech tends to enable active listening, whereas a jumbled speech tends to elicit passive listening (at best) from an audience.

Well Timed

Finally, an organized speech is well timed. In other words, its length meets the audience’s expectations and the requirements posed by the context. Speakers who talk without first organizing the content (in a “stream-of-consciousness” fashion) are more likely to talk too long or too briefly, or they may misappropriate how they spend time within their speech. Carefully attending to a speech’s organization should avoid those pitfalls and satisfy the timing expected for the occasion and by the audience.

The best speeches utilize organizational structures that meet all four goals. When any one goal is unmet, the speech’s success will suffer. A speech that is engaging and impactful but hard to follow, for example, may leave the audience wondering what they just heard. A speech that is easy to follow but poorly timed or boring, on the other hand, may lose the audience’s attention before it ends. Few speakers develop an effective organizational method the first time they write or outline their speech. Instead, they typically follow a more recursive pattern.

The Recursive Nature of Organization

The remainder of this chapter, along with the next two chapters, provides steps to organize your speech. Although they appear straightforward or linear, your process will likely be more recursive—that is, circular. The process moves forward and backward; it circles back on itself. You may write a thesis statement and then craft an introduction that leads up to it. You may develop your main points but discover that your focus evolved and you need to go back and revise your thesis.

Expect this recursivity as you draft your speech. The best speakers find themselves honing or tightening their ideas throughout the process of organizing them. Whatever your approach looks like, keep in mind that speeches need a clear purpose and central claim (thesis) to be successful. For this reason, we next turn to your thesis to build a strong foundation for the rest of your speech.

Thesis Statements: Identifying a Clear Purpose

The thesis statement is the central statement of the speech. It states the key idea or claim the speaker wants the audience to accept or adhere to. It is the focal point of your entire presentation.

All speeches should center on one key idea or proposition, ideally captured in a single sentence. That sentence should be written as a declaration; that is, it should be a complete sentence that makes a single statement or expresses an opinion or belief. Avoid a sentence that simply states facts, names a topic, provides a description, or asks a question. Writing your thesis as a single declarative sentence that centers on one idea or proposition keeps the focus of your speech straightforward, simple, and clear—for you and your audience. The rest of the speech should employ illustrations and arguments that support this central idea.

Fashioning a clear and concise thesis statement requires you to know the purpose of your speech. As you craft your thesis, consider the following questions to determine your broad purpose:

• Is my purpose to explain how an instance of public discourse operated productively or unproductively?
• Do I want to inform my audience about relevant approaches to addressing a problem before they engage in a public deliberation?
• Am I writing a speech to advocate for a specific plan of action to address a civic issue?
• Do I want to convince my audience about how a specific public artifact functioned persuasively?

The answers you give to these questions will influence the wording you use to articulate your thesis.

Your thesis wording should reflect your overarching purpose, which, in this textbook, is likely to be either informative or persuasive.

• Notice in the prior questions how the words “explain” and “inform” cue the audience that your purpose is to educate them. Additional words that signal an informative goal include “teach” and “learn.”
• Contrast those words with ones like “advocate” and “convince,” which imply that your goal is to persuade the audience. Similarly, words like “should” and “must” tend to suggest a persuasive goal.

Try incorporating such cuing language into your thesis to signal your overarching purpose to your audience.

Your more precise purpose will be narrower than informing or persuading your audience, of course. Your thesis will need to articulate what you will inform your audience about or hope to persuade them of. Consequently, your thesis should also name the more specific claim or central focus you want your audience to accept. Specifying your exact emphasis will help crystallize in your own mind what you want your speech to convey or advocate. It can then guide your decisions about what material you include in your speech and what you should leave out. Chapters 21 and 24 will further help you articulate your thesis for informative and persuasive speeches.

We will end this chapter with expanded boxes that look at a couple speakers’ attempts to come up with effective, appropriate thesis statements.

Box 12.5 A Sample Thesis to Inform an Audience as They Prepare for Deliberation

Javon was a member of his high school football team, and at the recent homecoming game, the star quarterback got a severe concussion. This was the fourth concussion of the season for Javon’s team, and he was scared. He saw news stories about NFL players who were suing the league due to severe brain injuries. Some suspected recent suicides by former NFL players might also be linked to concussions. Something needed to change.

He noticed that community members advocated for different solutions but did not carefully listen to each other’s ideas. They were talking past each other and getting nowhere. He felt that if they could sit down and discuss several perspectives and options, they might agree on a way forward. But first they would need to understand the potential solutions to the problem of concussions in high school football.

He decided to write a speech to inform community members about the options. His purpose was to ask his audience to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of several approaches before they deliberated together on a way forward.

Javon’s Draft Thesis for an Informative Speech

Javon began with this thesis statement:

We need to stop judging one another and listen better. We need to hear what other people in the community think because this is a way to show respect.

Javon’s draft thesis offers a fairly clear claim: We need to listen to and respect one another. But the thesis statement is also rather imprecise. He could say the same thing about any number of topics. The focus of his speech is not really about the importance of listening to one another but about the question he wanted his audience to consider more fully. After more thought, Javon rewrote his thesis so that it better aligned with his goals.

Javon’s Revised Thesis for an Informative Speech

The first thing we in Columbus need is a fuller understanding of the problem, as well as of multiple perspectives on addressing concussions in high school football, before we are ready to advocate and implement specific changes. With this goal in mind, the question that guides my speech this morning is, How can we best address the issue of concussions in high school football?

This revised thesis, you will notice, is not a clearly stated argument; rather, it is a question. Remember that advocacy is not Javon’s goal in this speech. His purpose is to inform his audience about a problem and possible solutions and to invite them to weigh options. (This is a necessary step before they move toward action in the future.)

To this end, Javon’s thesis statement does offer a directly stated focal point for his presentation. It is still the foundation on which the rest of his speech will be built. Not all thesis statements, then, are decisive arguments or claims. This is important to remember because, as discussed in chapter 2, many participants in public debates make the point of arguing without acknowledging the complexity of the problem or the competing interests of those they need to involve in addressing the problem. Often, productive civic engagement must begin by weighing trade-offs before advocating a solution.

Box 12.6 A Sample Thesis for Persuasion

Riley was passionate about the problem of animal abuse and neglect, and they wanted to give a speech on how to address this problem in their local county. They first considered advocating for changing local law to allow private or government agencies to more easily intervene when abusive or neglectful pet owners were identified. But Riley decided that a legislative route would take too long to have an effect.

So Riley decided to write a speech that discouraged audience members from putting time into legal reform but urged them to act in other tangible ways to improve the lives of local pets.

Riley’s Draft Thesis for a Persuasive Speech

Riley’s first thesis read,

We should support local animal control agencies that care for abused pets in our county.

The strengths of this thesis are that it states the solution Riley prefers, it is simple and direct, and it offers a narrow focus for the action they advocate.

This thesis does not, however, indicate exactly what Riley means by “support” or how the audience might make that happen. Presumably, Riley would identify and explain those actions in the speech. Riley may have liked that the thesis does not give everything away. But there is a risk here. The thesis might not provide enough information, and consequently, Riley might lose some audience members until they name specific actions within the speech.

Riley’s Revised Thesis for a Persuasive Speech

Riley decided to experiment with a more detailed thesis:

There are several ways to support our local animal control agency’s power to remove and care for abused animals in Montgomery County, but the most important thing you can do for neglected pets is to increase awareness in our county so more people know what counts as abuse and how to report it.

This thesis is more specific than the first thesis because it names the ways audience members can support local agencies. They can increase awareness about what counts as animal abuse and how to report it. Here, audience members know exactly what Riley means by “support”—unlike before. With this revised thesis, the purpose and direction of the speech are very clear.

The advantage of this type of thesis is that it prepares the audience to hear Riley’s request in a specific way; they will probably listen to the entire speech with an ear for why and how they should increase awareness of what counts as animal abuse and how to report it.

A well-crafted thesis identifies your purpose and focuses your and your audience’s attention. Though succinct, a thesis may take you several drafts to clearly articulate. Once you have crafted your thesis statement, you need to determine the best way to develop and support your thesis for a given audience. It is time to develop your main points, which the next chapter addresses.