Organizing of Your SpeechIf you thumb through any mailorder catalogue today, you will disc

Organizing of Your Speech

If you thumb through any mailorder catalogue today, you will discover that many of the items for sale are organizers—closet organizers, kitchen organizers and office organizers. Read enough catalogues, and you must conclude that is something exists, it can be organized. Why all these quest for organization？ Obviously, there's little point in having multiple possessions if you can't find them when you need them. Much the same is true of your speeches. If they are well organized, they will serve you better. Organization allows you and your listeners—to see what ideas you have and to put mental "hands" on the most important ones.

Organization is important

Several years ago a college professor took a wellorganized speech and scrambled it by randomly changing the order of its sentences. He then had a speaker deliver the original version to one group of listeners and the scrambled version to another group. After the speeches, he gave a test to see how well each group understood what they had heard. Not surprisingly, the group that heard the original, unscrambled speech stored much higher than the other group.

A few years later, two professors repeated the same experiment at another school. But instead of testing how well the listeners comprehended each speech, they tested to see what effects the speeches had on the listeners' attitudes toward the speakers. They found that people who heard tile wellorganized speech believed the speaker to be much more competent and trustworthy than did those who heard the scrambled speech.

These are just two of many studies that show the importance of organization in speechmaking. You realize how difficult it is to pay attention to the speaker, much less to understand the message. In fact, when students explain what they hope to learn from their speech class, they almost always put "the ability to organize my ideas more effectively" near the top of the list. This ability is especially vital for speechmaking. Listeners have little patience with speakers who bounce wildly from idea to idea. Keep in mind that listeners cannot flip back to a previous page if they have trouble grasping a speaker's ideas. In this respect a speech is much like a movie. A speaker must be sure listeners can follow the progression of ideas from beginning to end. This requires that speeches be organized strategically.

The first step in developing a strong sense of speech organization is to gain command of the three basic parts of a speech—introduction, body, and conclusion—and the strategic role of each. The body is the longest and most important part. Aim, you will usually prepare the body first. It is much easier to cream an effective introduction after you know exactly what you will say in the body. The process of organizing the body of a speech begins when you deter mine the main points.

Main points

The main points are the central features of your speech. You should select them carefully, phrase them precisely, and arrange them strategically. Here are the main points of a student speech about the medical uses of hypnosis:

Specific purpose:

To inform. my audience about the major uses of hypnosis.

Central Idea:

The major uses of hypnosis today are to control pain in medical surgery, to help people stop smoking, and to help students improve their academic performance.

Main points:

Hypnosis is used in surgery as an adjunct to chemical anesthesia.

Hypnosis is used to help people stop smoking.

Hypnosis is used to help students improve their academic performance.

These three main points form. the skeleton of the body of the speech. If there are three major uses of hypnosis for medical purposes, then logically there can be three main points in the speech.<

A．Y

B．N

C．NG