Hey everyone! In this lesson we'll be going over how to write speeches, focusing on the structure of speeches. We'll start by looking at some broad features of speech structure and then some specific structures for informative speeches, demonstrative speeches, persuasive speeches and entertaining speeches. So let's get into it!
Before we get into the structure we want to keep in mind that even if some speeches are about demonstrating, persuading or entertaining, the main purpose of our speech is to inform. Now, there's a general structure for all speeches, regardless of what type they are. This is made up of three main features, a greeting, a body and a concluding sentence. The body of the speech is really dependent on the speech type. But we can have a look at how the introduction and the conclusion will shape up, since these elements are pretty constant across speech types.
A really important feature of a speech is the greeting. The greeting is the little address to the audience right at the beginning of the speech. And we need to greet them appropriately. We can start with a standard and non-personal opening. Or we can be a bit more specific to our audience.
Have a pause and read these different greetings. The second one is the better option. because it immediately establishes who the audience is. So we want to be personal to our audience in the greeting.
We also need to finish our speech with the concluding sentence. A simple and effective way of doing this is by thanking the audience, saying something like, thank you all for your time. It's not a great idea to cut the speech off cold because it can look untidy and unfinished. So write a concluding sentence when we can.
Now let's look at how the body, the part between the introduction and concluding sentence, can change based on the speech type. Informative speeches are up first. Pretty much all of the speeches we write are going to be informative, or have the purpose of informing.
The main thing for an informative speech is that our structure is clear and logical. When we're teaching someone something new, like how to change a car battery for example, We want the audience to be able to follow our line of thinking, so that we're fulfilling our purpose of informing the audience. A great way to do this is with super structured paragraphs between our usual greeting and concluding sentence.
Each body paragraph should deal with a separate idea or issue under our main topic, and we should move from one topic to the next in a way that the audience can easily follow. Now Or with a demonstrative speech we're teaching the audience how to do something. So a good idea is to follow the steps of the process.
By this I mean that after our greeting and before our concluding sentence we can structure our speech around the steps in our demonstration. If we're teaching how to fix a car battery, each paragraph or section of the body can be based on the natural order of fixing up the battery. We'd have step one, two and three as paragraphs to help teach the audience how to fix the battery. Okay, next up is persuasive speeches.
With a goal of persuading the audience while informing them, we can borrow a really familiar structure from essay writing. We'd have an introductory paragraph, giving an overview of the issues. Then a body that expands on our arguments. And finally, a concluding paragraph that summarises everything. These paragraphs get sandwiched in between our greeting and concluding sentence, which is the same for all speech types.
If we're persuading our audience to change their car battery, our introduction will cover what a car battery is and a broad reason to change it. Then, each paragraph will give a different and more specific reason to change the battery. Finally, we'll conclude by summing up our arguments and recapping our main point. When arguing a particular point in support of our bigger argument or perspective, formatting is super important.
Using structured paragraphs helps make our information and topic seem logical, precise and well thought out. And that's exactly what we want in a persuasive speech. Last but not least is entertaining speeches. If our purpose is to entertain while informing, it can be really helpful to structure our speech like a narrative. Like telling a story or explaining something with a beginning, a middle, a climax, and a resolution inside of our standard introduction and conclusion.
This structure is useful because it has a natural build of tension to keep the audience engaged, then excites the audience with its climax. For example, if we're telling the comedic tale of how someone got an electric shock while changing a car battery, the introduction will set the scene. Why did it need changing?
Where did it happen? When did it happen? Then we can start to build on this by increasing the tensions in the story and making things more dramatic. We'll creep towards the big climax, the electric shock. Then we can resolve it with how things ended.
A hospital trip, getting rid of the car, Anything that gives a sense of completion. And that's it for this one. To recap, we looked at the two broad features of structure, a greeting and a concluding sentence.
Then we specified the body structures of each speech type that fall between the greeting and the concluding sentence. An informative speech should have a clear introductory paragraph, body paragraphs and conclusion. A demonstrative speech should have body paragraphs centred around teaching different steps in a method. A persuasive speech should outline different arguments in each body. Finally, an entertaining speech should build like a narrative, with the tensions reaching a climax and then dropping to a resolution.
And that's all for today. See you next time.