In this video, I am going to begin a discussion about the organizing of a speech. More particularly, the organizing of the body of the speech. Let me start off by saying that if your speeches are well organized, they will serve you better. Let me tell you what good organization does.
Organization allows you and your listeners to see what ideas... you have to offer and form a mental vision of your speech. It allows your listeners to have a mental vision of your speech.
They can see the structure as you're moving along. Think about it this way. Have you ever taken a class under someone and you're really confused in the class because the instructor is all over the map?
It's like they're not tying the ideas together. This is a topic and this is a topic but they don't seem to fit. You have to have an understanding of this one to have an understanding of this one but you're, you know, you can't connect the dots.
And then you drop the course only to take it again the next semester under another instructor and for some reason under that instructor everything seems to click. Boom! It's logical. This main point is a precursor for the next main point and all of the ideas fit together.
Well, let me ask you something. Does it mean that the second instructor is more intelligent in the subject matter than the first instructor was? No, not at all.
Quite often the first instructor might even be the more intelligent of the two, which makes it difficult for them to put their information in terms that we regular folks can understand. What it means is that the second instructor has a better understanding of what we're going to start discussing in this video. And that is organizing the speech because with the second instructor, you actually had a mental vision of their organization. You can actually kind of see where they were going with their ideas. You can see how the pieces fit together.
And that's the purpose of this sequence in this oral communication course. It's to allow your listeners to have a mental vision of what you are presenting. I'm going to talk to you for a moment about listeners.
I'm not going to talk to you as listeners. We've already done that. But I'm going to talk to you about listeners.
Listeners demand consistency and coherence. I'll say that again. Listeners demand consistency and coherence.
Wouldn't you agree that it's human nature for us to become impatient with a speaker who moves from one main point to another at random? Yes. What we're becoming impatient with is their lack of consistency, their inability to put all the pieces before us in a way that makes them fit together.
So listeners demand consistency and coherence. That's what this whole video and the immediate ones that follow really is all about. You want to find patterns in the way you deliver your speech that are consistent and that your audience can rely on.
Once again, Think about the classroom situation. You know, we have teachers who are, I call them listing instructors. I'm one of them. I'm sure you've noticed by now that I'm a listing instructor. I give lists, four main causes of poor listening.
Five things you can do to improve listening. Four questions to ask about a speaker's evidence, you know. I give lists. What happens to you When I or some other instructor who gives lists forgets to number it. You know, if I say number one, blah, blah, blah.
Number two, da, da, da. Number three, blah, blah, blah. You guys are fine. But what about if you're in a classroom and the teacher goes, number one, blah, blah, blah. Number two, blah, blah, blah.
They skip saying number three and just go right into the material. What happens to you guys? You look to your right and your left, to your neighbors, you go... Are we still on number two?
I didn't know. Are we still on number two? No, I think we're on number one.
No, you know, some dude in the back goes, dude, I thought we were on number four. That's a different story altogether. It's not the material that's throwing you off.
It's the inconsistency in the pattern of delivery. If I'm a listing instructor and I state to you that there are five of something, you want me to list them as five. There's another instructor that teaches this same stuff.
for Black River Technical College. I don't know if he's a listing instructor or not. Maybe.
Maybe he just comes up to the podium and starts talking about the four main causes of poor listening. Does it matter that you learn about jumping to conclusions before you learn about focusing on minute details? You have to learn about focusing on delivery and personal appearance before you learn about these other things. No.
He doesn't give a list, therefore the students aren't... aren't looking for a list, they're just learning the material. In both classes, as long as we're consistent in the way we present, both sets of students are doing well. It's when the presenter violates a pattern of delivery that they have established with a group that throws that group off and starts to confuse them.
That's what we're going to start addressing in this and the following videos. See, listeners... don't have the same luxury that readers have.
You know, if you are reading a page in a book and you get down to the bottom of that page and you're confused, or maybe you were daydreaming, or maybe the book was a little sloppy in the way it presented the information, we have the luxury of going back to the top of that page or flipping that page back and going to another one, rereading it. until we comprehend. You can't do that with a formal presenter. A listener can't make a formal presenter go back and repeat a passage of the speech.
So as I speak to you now as speakers, you need to understand that you need to be clear and concise the first time that you deliver information. Speech organization is closely related to critical thinking. you go back to our notes on critical thinking or critical listening, you remember that we were talking about listening as an evaluator.
Listening to see if there were fault in the reasoning or gaps in the logic or something like this. As a speech organizer, you need to be your own critical listener. You need to look at your own work and try to discover inconsistencies in the way or the appearance of inconsistencies in the way you're speaking. the way that you deliver things.
Back when I was talking about the four main causes of poor listening, I said in one sentence, in one breath, that one of the main causes of poor listening is that we have a tendency to jump to conclusions. That we think we are so sure of what the other party is going to say next that we conclude that person's thoughts for them and we wander off and daydream. And then just shortly thereafter, in a I think in the next video I said, oh, one thing we need to do to improve our listing is to try to think ahead of the speaker in anticipation of what will come next. I'm sure that some of you saw the appearance of an inconsistency there. Well, doesn't that sound like you're advising us to jump to conclusions?
If you recall, I had predicted that question. So I had prepared an elaboration on... separating jumping from conclusions to thinking ahead of the speaker in anticipation of what will come next.
Jumping conclusions was a passive implementation of a human tendency, and the other was an active implementation of a human tendency. And so I addressed the appearance of that inconsistency. As a speech organizer, you need to look for what might be an appearance of contradiction or inconsistency and either fix it prior to or make it part of the elaboration, part of the learning experience when you deliver that to your audience. So just like critical thinking speech organizers should look for things that allow them to detect the appearance of inconsistencies. Also It's been proven that a clear, concise, specific method of speech organization can boost the confidence of a speaker.
Meaning good organization would improve the speaker's ability in delivering the message. Which is what most beginning speakers have the biggest problem with. That anxiety, we call it stage fright, about getting up in front of a crowd of people and delivering a message. Ah. Quite often that anxiety comes from the lack of preparation.
Not that the student hasn't really worked hard preparing for the speech. speech, but quite often the student, the beginning speaker, doesn't know what to work on, and their organization is sloppy. So they're a little confused when they deliver.
That's what causes the anxiety, all right? So if you really pay close attention to what we will talk about in the future videos, you will learn to overcome a lot of your speech anxiety by, you know, organizing your speech well, by structuring your main points. in an order that seems consistent and coherent. Then you'll know, oh, some of you will be even excited about delivering information that you have a passion on because you have confidence in that the structure will be effective to the audience.
So... The first step in delivering a strong sense of speech organization is to gain an understanding of the three basic parts of a speech. I'll say that again.
The first step in developing a strong sense of speech organization is to gain an understanding of the three basic parts of the speech. What are the three basic parts of a speech? Think about that.
There are the three basic parts. of anything literarily academic? You know what they are.
The three basic parts of a speech are the introduction, the body, and the conclusion. You might be thinking to yourself, well yeah that's kind of common sense. Well maybe it is, but let's talk about the significance of it.
In my normal classrooms when I have traditional classrooms and students sitting before me, I will say what are the three basic parts of the speech. They'll answer it. usually and they'll say introduction, body, and conclusion. And I'll say, okay, why do you answer it in that order?
Why do you list introduction first, the body, and then the conclusion? Why is that answer always given in that order? And they'll say, because that's the order that it's delivered.
All right, that's true. Well, because that's the order that we receive it, that we decode it as listeners. That's also true. And sometimes they'll say, well, that's the order that you write it. Let's talk about that.
Many people remember when we had English teachers and speech teachers in public school, they would often tell us the infamous saying that you have also come across in one of your supplemental videos, that we are to tell an audience what we're going to tell them, then we are to tell them, then we are to tell them what they were told. So they tell us to prepare an introduction with all the information we have. all the main points, you know, introducing the main points, the thesis statement, the central idea, and all of that.
Then prepare a body of knowledge based on that introduction. Then we are to conclude. How many of you remember the teachers telling us to do it in that order?
I'm going to tell you that's not an appropriate method for working on a formal presentation. What that forces us to do is take that pen or that pencil, if you're an older person, start in the upper left-hand corner of the paper and just try to keep writing all the way through to the end of that thing. Or if you're on a computer, you start in the upper left-hand corner and you try to type all the way through to the end of the speech.
Well, let me ask you a question. Can you introduce something that doesn't yet exist? I'll ask again.
Can you introduce something that doesn't yet exist? Can you introduce a body of knowledge that you've yet to compile? The answer is no. So therein lies the trouble. We start writing an introduction, introducing something that we've not yet worked on.
So the nightmare for us, especially as students, because we're not familiar with the language, becomes this. Well, we've written an introduction. Now we're down the body of the speech, and we say, doggone it. I didn't cover that in the introduction.
Now I've got to go back up and revise the introduction. You might do that five, six times. Before you know it, that perfect introduction is now looking a little sloppy, a little incoherent.
Or you might be down the body of the speech finally and go, I didn't mention that in the introduction, so I'm not going to talk about it here. And now we're leaving gaps out of the presentation because somebody... somewhere along the line taught us you tell them what you're going to say you tell them what they're you know then you tell them then you tell them what they're told and indicated that we should write our message in that same format no you cannot introduce a body of knowledge that you've yet to compile so you should always start with preparing the body of the presentation first.
That makes sense. That's what we talked about in the last video. That's when you go through the topic, general purpose, specific purpose, and central idea in order to discover your main points.
Now you know what the main points are, work on those main points. Put the meat on the bones. Prepare the speech, the body of knowledge. Then you go back and you work on the introduction or the conclusion.
You know what? It doesn't even matter what you do second. to the introduction second or the conclusion second. They are both just summations. One obviously in a preliminary fashion and the other one in a concluding fashion.
But you have to have that body of knowledge first. All right. So once you establish your main points, you now work on the main points and your goal then becomes discovering the order in which you're going to present your... your main points?
Should I talk about this first? Should I talk about this second? Should I maybe move this to the end of my speech for a big bang or should I open up with it?
So there's something that we in the speech world refer to as the strategic order of the main points. The strategic order of the main points. Fancy way of saying the strategy that we speakers employ when preparing the main points.
And when we get into our next video. That's exactly what we're going to discuss. The strategic order of the main points so we know which one to start with, which one to end with, and which ones to structure in between. Thank you.