The number of US school shootings in recent years has many Americans alarmed and calling for change. But figuring out what should change, how, and who is responsible are difficult questions to answer. Should we tighten security measures at schools? Better drill students and staff for such emergencies? Increase the number of police officers and enhance their training? Decrease classroom sizes? Provide affordable and easy access to mental health services? Stiffen background checks for purchasing guns? Ban assault weapons?

Difficult cases rarely offer one right answer or one universally satisfying way forward. Instead, they raise the need for communities to learn about the problem, possible options, and opposing perspectives before making decisions. In this chapter, we turn to a form of speech that effectively meets that need: informative speaking.

In what follows, we first broadly outline the major features and types of informative speaking. The remainder of this chapter and the following chapter focus on one version of informative speaking: the deliberative presentation. We will define and explain the deliberative presentation as an especially useful way to address public controversies. We will then explore the first three steps of preparing a deliberative presentation: selecting a wicked problem, researching the problem, and discovering a range of approaches that address the wicked problem. Chapter 21 will discuss the remaining steps of framing and organizing the problem for deliberation.

Informative Speaking

In informative speaking, a speaker educates their direct audience about a topic without leading them toward a particular position, conclusion, or outcome. Recall from chapter 10 that the direct audience consists of people who are exposed to and attend to your speech.

In this type of speaking, you set your personal preferences aside and present a neutral, fair, and inclusive understanding of the topic. Of course, none of us can remain completely impartial, and staying impartial does not prevent you from sharing relevant, personal experiences. The goal is to do your best to keep your opinions in check to allow audience members to arrive at their own conclusions.

The need for informative speaking in civic affairs may not be self-evident. After all, information has never been easier to obtain for people with access to the internet. However, the material provided through the internet can quickly become overwhelming, and not all of it is reliable.

Few of us have the time—or, at least, take the time—to thoughtfully discover, evaluate, read, and process information from multiple sources. Instead, we may glance at headlines or articles in our social media feeds or even abandon the effort altogether. It can be tempting to leave civic affairs to public officials and specialists to save ourselves the trouble. Consequently, we remove ourselves from decision-making that may directly impact our quality of life.

Informative speaking, then, is critical to democratic participation. An informative speech empowers listeners by drawing attention to public concerns, presenting relevant and reliable information from credible sources, and helping a community make sense of that information.

Types of Informative Speeches in a Civic Engagement Context

Different kinds of informative speeches enable civic engagement in various ways. In this section we briefly describe three types of informative speeches that aid democratic participation: instructional speeches, problem-focused speeches, and deliberative presentations.

Instructional Speeches

An instructional speech explains or teaches an audience about a process, concept, or entity to help community members participate in civic affairs more easily and confidently. This type of informative speech stops short of actively promoting involvement or prescribing particular actions. Such advocacy becomes persuasion and is the focus of chapters 24 and 25. Instead, you simply lay the groundwork for involvement should an audience member choose to take part.

Problem-Focused Speeches

Problem-focused speeches identify, describe, and explain a civic problem. The goal is to help an audience understand the issue and possibly prepare them to address it. Most typically, a problem-focused informative speech will explain the problem’s history, impacts on those affected, probable cause(s), and major components. Such a speech avoids naming or advocating a solution, though it might explain previous efforts to address the problem.

Deliberative Presentations

A deliberative presentation strives to fairly and evenhandedly describe a civic problem and multiple approaches to solving it. Emphasis is placed on the benefits and drawbacks of each approach. A deliberative presentation functions as the setup or preparation for a deliberative discussion, which is a group conversation through which a community, guided by one or more moderators, examines a complex public problem and a range of available solutions to ultimately arrive at a choice or conclusion. Together, the deliberative presentation and subsequent discussion form the deliberative process (also referred to simply as deliberation). The deliberative process involves a presentation of a problem and multiple options and a subsequent moderated discussion of those options (though the format and timing of both parts can vary).

The nature and emphasis of the deliberative process is educational. We want to better understand the problem and investigate each solution in the most open manner possible. Note the emphasis on probing and contrasting solutions to the problem, unlike a problem-focused speech.

Indeed, the ultimate end goal—and a key distinguishing feature of the deliberative process—is that the participating community chooses the option it wants to pursue or at least outlines the next steps required. Ideally, the process results in consensus on a way forward, but that may not always be the case. Eventually, traditional persuasive efforts and/or voting may be appropriate.

The deliberative process is ideally suited to address a public controversy, or what others have called a wicked problem—that is, an issue that is difficult to resolve because it involves diverse values and perspectives about what the problem is, who is responsible, and how it should be addressed.^[1] A wicked problem is widely acknowledged as a problem and draws broad concern locally, nationally, or even internationally. It may be persistent, such as the issues of gun violence and immigration; or it may become prominent at certain moments and then die down only to resurface again later, such as controversies over oil spills and nuclear power. The point is that wicked problems are never completely resolved; they can only be gradually improved. In contrast, tame problems are simpler issues that can be solved with expertise.

Wicked problems are marked by contingency, a condition in which events and circumstances are dependent on several variables that evolve in unpredictable ways. Thus, the effects of any decision made about a wicked problem cannot be fully anticipated.

Because informative speaking is educational, it typically takes place before we select or advocate for any solution, conclusion, or belief. Communities need to know and understand before they can select and decide. Whatever the type of speech, informative speaking should result in an improved understanding of the topic addressed. In the case of deliberative speaking, audience members should also have a thorough review of several possible solutions. Because of the importance of deliberative presentations, we will focus the remainder of this chapter and the next chapter on the steps involved in producing and delivering such an address.

Preparing a Deliberative Presentation

The specific steps you should take to prepare a deliberative presentation include selecting a wicked problem, researching the problem, discovering a range of approaches, framing the issue for deliberation, and organizing the presentation. This chapter will explain the first three steps, and the next chapter will focus on framing and organization.

Selecting a Wicked Problem

Developing a deliberative presentation begins with identifying a wicked problem. Your instinct may be to shy away from difficult issues, particularly those you know little about. This reaction is natural, but try to resist it. Take the initiative to educate yourself. Effective democracies rely on participants who learn and help make decisions about civic matters—and who do not shy away from conflicting viewpoints. In fact, democracy thrives on diverse views and on reasoned, thoughtful discussion. As a student of public communication, learn to embrace productive conflict as a healthy element of democracy. You cannot avoid conflict without also avoiding participation in democratic governance.

Researching the Wicked Problem

Once you have selected a wicked problem, use the advice provided in chapters 8 and 9 to research the issue and to identify and correct misinformation and disinformation—particularly about the problem, its background, impacts, and contributing factors.

Factual information alone, however, cannot resolve a wicked problem. You must also consider the people impacted by, and invested in, the issue. In chapter 10, we identified the implicated audience as people affected by your message if it succeeds. We also introduced the concept of personal stakes, which are an individual’s financial, material, and/or psychological investments that can be improved or worsened based on how an issue is addressed. A slight variation on implicated audiences and personal stakes is the idea of stakeholders, or groups and organizations that have vested interests in a wicked problem and its outcome because of the impact on their lives.

Every public issue impacts many different groups, so you should also research multiple stakeholders. Discovering their needs, lived experiences, values, and preferences can help you better understand—and inform your direct audience about—the issue from multiple angles.

You might also be a stakeholder yourself in the wicked problem you’ve chosen. If so, reflect on your own experiences and interests to inform your presentation. Relying too much on your own knowledge, however, will likely blind you to aspects of the problem you have never experienced or considered because of your standpoint. Recall from chapter 7 that standpoint theory suggests that our social identities influence our knowledge of the world and our perceptions of what is true or normal. In the case of school shootings, for example, our identity is likely to influence our perceptions of shooters, guns, gun violence, and police officers. If you are a white person who lives in a rural setting, for instance, you are more likely to associate school shootings with troubled kids and associate police officers and guns with offering potential safety and protection.

By researching and discovering additional stakeholders, you will discover not only additional perspectives but also how stakeholders are differently impacted by the wicked problem. Indeed, we recommend you research how inequity plays a role in the wicked problem and who it particularly impacts.

Your thinking about stakeholders should not result in telling your audience a laundry list of groups. Instead, use this work to clarify for your audience how the wicked problem differently affects the lives and interests of diverse groups and thus why their preferences might conflict. For instance, include examples of differing stakeholders when educating your audience about the wicked problem. As you discover and explain diverse approaches to the problem—a task we turn to next—specify which stakeholders are benefited and harmed by each approach and how.

Discovering a Range of Approaches

Once you have selected a wicked problem and researched its elements and stakeholders, identify a range of approaches to improving the issue. As discussed in chapter 2, we tend to divide issues into two sides, often “for” a policy change and “against” it. This binary approach is popular, but it reduces complicated issues to tidy, oppositional dichotomies as if everyone on each side is in complete agreement and no one from opposing sides agrees on anything.

Try to avoid getting caught up in two-sided policy debates. Do not make two of your approaches the extremes in a debate and the third approach a halfway measure or compromise between them. Such a setup prompts a debate rather than a deliberation, or it encourages most participants to choose the third option.

Instead, seek a much wider range of approaches. As box 20.11 advises, brainstorming, considering stakeholders’ interests, and researching will help you find suitable and diverse approaches. You might, for instance, discover how inequity or systems of oppression contribute to the wicked problem and focus one approach on targeting such inequity.

As you gather perspectives, preferences, and policy ideas, refrain from evaluating their merit. The sole criterion is that all ideas listed are reasonable. Options that no one in their right mind would choose are not useful for a deliberative presentation.

Then look for repetition or similarities across the ideas so you can sort them into three approaches to present to your audience. By approach we mean a broad category of similar opinions on how to address a wicked problem, typically gathered around a shared logic and value. A single approach should be broad enough to include several, and possibly conflicting, actions by multiple actors.

Box 20.12 Sample Approaches to the Wicked Problem of School Shootings

1. Adopt stronger security efforts, with the logic that if it is more difficult to bring or hide a gun on school property, there will be fewer shootings there.

a. Specific sample actions: Restrict kids to carrying clear backpacks, use metal detectors at entrances, and hire more on-site security officers.

b. People who like this approach would agree with the overall emphasis on security, but they might disagree with each other over which sample actions should be chosen.

2. Improve youth wellness. Such an approach poses the logic that if communities know and attend to young people’s emotional and psychological needs better, then they will be less likely to resort to shooting each other.

a. Specific sample actions: Incorporate daily meditation practices into classrooms, hire more school counselors, offer training in dispute reconciliation, fund community centers, and strengthen family involvement.

b. All these ideas are included in one approach because they emphasize youths’ mental health and wellness, though people attracted to this approach might disagree on which specific sample actions will be most effective.

3. What might be a third broad approach?

Rest assured there is no one right set of three approaches for any wicked problem, and you might even want to present four or five. Your goal is simply to provide a set of truly divergent approaches that account for most, if not all, of the concerns and opinions you discovered about the wicked problem. Everyone in the community who hears your deliberative presentation should be able to find their own outlook somewhere in the approaches you provide.