in this video we're going to begin talking about the speech writing process so we're actually moving now into the formal presentation portion of this oral communication course and i'm going to talk to you more in line with the duties that a student has in fulfilling a speech assignment more so than what an actual speaker has to deal with when preparing for a speech i'll get into talking to you as speakers in some future videos but as students you need to follow a four-step process that it makes it easy for you to establish an appropriate topic for your speech assignment as well as a list of main points we have an added burden as students that real speakers don't have students have to choose a topic in real life speakers are chosen because of the topic you have expertise they want to learn about your expertise they invite you to speak but in a speech class you not only are assigned to speech you're assigned to choose a topic teachers don't give you uh the topic some of you want us to but the problem is we don't know your interests we don't know your background your history your qualifications or so forth and so it's up to you to decide what you're qualified to speak about so let's talk about choosing topics from the standpoint of a student speaker see if you agree with this choosing a topic is the most difficult part of speech preparation especially when it comes to a student for students choosing a topic is the most important step for making sure that you have as comfortable and relaxed and experienced at the podium as you possibly can you see there are things that happen to students in a classroom this is not a traditional classroom this is an online classroom but i'm sure many of you can relate to what i'm about to describe poor topic selection is what often causes the classroom loudmouths and i say that those words affectionately i was a classroom loudmouth i'm not talking about smart lx i'm not talking about people who disrupt i'm just talking about the students in the classroom that talk more than all the other students poor topic selection is what causes the loudmouths in a classroom to freeze up when they come up to give a speech you've seen it people that we think should have all the confidence in the world get up and they are the ones who get breathy you know their voice starts to quiver and their lip shakes and their hands shake and uh they look like they're going to pass out and we're really surprised because that seemed to have been the most confident person in the world in the in the classroom so classroom loudmouths often go through this for a reason the classroom loudmouth has a false sense of confidence you know the classroom loudmouth is in full control of the quality of what they contribute to the class think about it this way um you know if you're one of those people and you get a thought you think it's funny and the class will laugh and the instructor will laugh you're pretty sure of it you'll throw it out there and we get a good laugh out of it if you think it's going to advance the debate or impress the teacher and others because you have a deeper understanding of the subject matter you toss it out there but if you ever doubt the thought that enters your mind what happens we have the ability to keep it to ourselves so you have uh 100 quality control over your effort from that chair uh in in the standard classroom so the classroom loudmouth is used to always succeeding when they deliver dialogue and they think to themselves well i'm not afraid to be in front of people i'm not afraid to talk out loud uh be entertaining or clowning or something like this i should have no problem doing a speech and then what happens is they come up here and they stammer and they stutter and stuff like that and at the same time the most shy person in the class the person you never heard speak who seems really timid surprises us by coming up to the to the podium and being very thorough and very fluent and very articulate in the way that they deliver and we're like wow where did that come from well see the classroom loudmouth has that problem uh where they have a false sense of confidence when they come up to the podium the classroom loudmouth is now having to be successful with every thought that they have and every breath that they draw and every line that they deliver and they're not used to that when you write a speech you start to doubt yourself a little bit during the encoding process we often say nah this isn't funny this isn't entertaining this isn't informative they're going to be bored with this and we doubt it's common it's human nature and that classroom loud rap mouth is not used to having to deal with that and believe it or not they have to be successful with every breath they draw and they don't know how to do it see classroom loud mouth doesn't talk all the time they don't even talk most of the time they don't even talk 10 percent of the time they just talk more than the other students now they're having to deliver 100 of the time that's what throws their confidence off in a formal presentation where that shy timid person comes up to speak and guess what this is no different than their normal everyday life uh this is their comfort zone if you will they they know how to deal with anxiety communicative anxiety you know they don't like to talk to you face to face at a lunch table all right so they've learned to deal with that anxiety it's the same thing up here it's not as stunning to them to come up here and face a crowd as it is the loudmouth who's never had to be successful with every thought he or she had so what causes that what causes that person to freeze up clam up in front of the class it is poor topic selection poor topic selection often students and you know what i'm talking about you don't choose topics for a paper or for a speech based on what you know or how much of a passion you have for it uh quite often you are looking to get out of some work that's human nature i wouldn't knock you for that and you want to find something to write about speak about that is very easy to access you know uh at the time of this lecture we're dealing with the covet 19 experience if you were to write a speech there is so much information out there you don't even have to look two feet in front of you it's there it's on every news channel it's on every radio station you can google a billion uh bits of information about it's on every new magazine rack newspaper rack and everything else and you might think ah i'm gonna give it on this it's current issue everybody's talking about it and it's so easy to access but that would be a mistake for a lot of you because while there is a lot of information out there most of us aren't keeping up with these specific numbers you know the origins of the virus and how it was spread and and you know why certain countries seem to have more and how testing factors into that and you know the curves and the flattenings and oh boy you get all this information all of a sudden you're flooded with stuff to talk about and you're not prepared to do it you see i was a classroom loud mouth and in uh when i went started high school in the 1970s um it was shortly i mean very shortly a couple years after roe versus wade the infamous uh supreme court decision on abortion not going to get into that discussion and here but uh we uh back then even in high school we talk about stuff i've said before it's a shame that we've kind of veered away from that in educational institutions but back then it was welcome we'd have a debate people in the classroom would you know fire off differences of opinions the teachers would get involved and i had a very strong opinion on that subject i won't get into what the opinion is it hasn't changed since those days but i was pretty impassioned about it and i would go back forth with a teacher and by the way it was respectful we all did that but that's for another day i chose that topic back then we didn't have the computers and we couldn't google we didn't have internet we didn't have any of those things we had this dinosaur called a a card catalog you know and you go to the library and you try to find as many articles on your topic in this case it was abortion or roma versus wade and um as you possibly could and get as many stats and stuff and it took a long time to do all that research so i wanted so being a lazy student i thought boy abortion is the hot topic issue everybody's talking about it i'm going to do it on that and i went and gathered all this information well you know how we are students we're just worthless procrastinating maggots you know we don't give you should give yourself several days to work on a speech for a classroom but some of you don't you go two days uh one day that's not good your grade will reflect it but i went two days i think on that and i gathered all the information i spent two days trying to prepare that speech and guess what i found out i found out that while i had a strong interest in that subject matter i knew nothing about it nothing i knew nothing about the procedures i didn't know too much about uh the political issues involved i didn't know the statistics i didn't know anything so i compiled all this information that i knew nothing about and i'm posting it on postcards and all of this kind of stuff i put it in front of me and i go up to speak that day and everybody expects me to just knock it out of the park they'd heard me debate with the teacher and all of this and i fell apart i was breathing i do i have a statistic and i'm trying to attach it with this quote and stuff because i knew nothing about it what i should have done was chosen something i was far more familiar with which leads me to this note uh there are two criteria that a classroom speech topic should include when you choose a topic for your classroom speech actually i'm going to change that to three criteria three criteria three for a classroom speech topic and those three criteria are subjects that you know about subjects that you love and or interested in which i met that category with the abortion speech and subjects that your audience is interested in you want to make sure that all three of those items are packed into your topic selection subjects you know about subjects that you love and are interested in and subjects that your audience is interested in so maybe i should have shown that class how to lace a ball glove or tuna snare drum or something like that that would have been far more fitting to my knowledge base than the topic that i chewed chose now if you are struggling to choose a topic for your classroom speech some of you can figure it out just like that uh you got a pretty good idea what you're going to talk about others are going to struggle i want you to pay close attention if you're struggling to what i'm about to say this entire unit from topic general purpose specific purpose central idea uh is about getting started and not being that student who tries one night to get started choose a topic throws it away says i forget i'll try tomorrow and you go again tomorrow forget it i'll try tomorrow and you go two or three days to the point where you're beating your head against the wall you go screw it i'll take a d i'll take a c or whatever it is on this speech it's not that important i'm going to help you bypass this this whole process of topic general purpose specific purpose and central idea is about you taking a broad general topic and getting more and more focused more and more narrow as you move to the central idea of the speech so if you're struggling with the topic i'm this is the beginning of you understanding how to how to make this easy on yourself if you pay close attention to this and the next few videos your speech will write itself for you it will outline itself for you so here it goes if you're struggling with topic selection there is a process a brainstorming process that speakers use all right i'll i'll explain the process to you uh it will also be on the study notes that that you can click on you know to help through the process as well but we aren't going to take the time to do it during this video so what you do is you choose i shouldn't say choose you make a list of um nine categories they're broad categories they are people things processes concepts natural phenomena problems and the last one is plans and policies so if you wrote those down or if you are if you're looking at them on my study notes or you go to those study notes later you'll notice that just about anything you can possibly talk about in the world can be generally housed under these nine categories so what they say to do is you look at those nine categories and without even giving it a thought the things that come to mind don't even have to pertain but you should just take the first six items that come to your mind under each category bam bam bam bam you jot them down and now you have 54 items and possibly go oh yeah i forgot i know how to make fishing lures i can give a speech about that i know how to do duck calls you know i know how to collect baseball cards or whatever the case might be that might remind you they say that if out of those 54 items you can't find something it says choose six of those and list the next uh six items that come to mind and just do that and before you know it in just a few minutes you'll you'll be triggered as to what you can give your speech about instead of a few days this takes just a very short period of time think about having written a paper in high school struggled to choose a topic you finally did you struggled through the paper the minute you turned it in you go crap i could have given a paper on this why didn't i think of this now that the pressure's off uh you know that your thought process clears up the brainstorming technique can help those of you who are experiencing uh that pressure now when you uh choose a topic or i should say when you express a topic like if you're telling someone what you're speaking about or you're writing it down on your assignment to turn into me which we'll discuss later on that topic should be expressed as that one word or group of words that best represent your subject matter in the most general sense the one word or group of words that best represents your subject matter in the most general sense so let's pretend that i'm giving a speech to a group of people who are interested in collecting as a hobby and want to learn what to look for in a baseball card now what would my topic be what would the one word or couple of words be that represents my uh topic selection some of you might say uh what to look for in a baseball card or how to determine the value of a baseball card or something like this well let me tell you that words like what to do or how to do this or why these are not topics topics pertain to what you're talking about not why you're talking about it i'm simply going to use as my topic baseball cards baseball cards that's it you know it's the most general word uh that represents what i'm talking about if i put collectibles that would be okay uh fine you don't have to it doesn't have to be an exact word but you want to leave out things that deal with why you're giving the speech by the way i said i'm going to give this speech to a group of people who want to learn how to collect baseball cards when you give your speech in here you get to do something that we call assuming your audience assuming your audience you are going to uh be be allowed to assume to pretend that we are whoever you want us to be um that when you submit your speech to me you can pretend that i'm a group of truck drivers or nurses or first graders uh or beginning collectors which is what i might put on my paper and what that does for you is it makes it easier for your teacher me in this case uh to grade you because it's a fake speech it's a classroom speech the students in a classroom don't really have the same interests that that you have so you get to make us whoever you want all right and once you determine who we are beginning nurses or musicians or athletes or whatever we are then everything you do in your speech and on your outline should potential pertain to that specific group of people but remember when you finally narrow down your topic it should be worded as that one word or group of words that represent your subject matter in the most general sense make sure you look at the study notes to see this stuff in print to make it easier for you to determine what you're going to use for the topic in your first speech thank you