Page 402 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

• Informative speeches are common in the classroom, the workplace, and the
community.
• Successful informative speeches are audience involving, audience appropri-
ate, audience accessible, and potentially life enriching.
• Informative speeches can be used to explain, instruct, demonstrate, or de-
scribe processes, concepts, and skills.

Check Your Understanding: Exercises and Activities

1. Develop an outline for a brief speech in which you inform an audience about
a topic with which you are personally familiar. Then show how you would
adapt the speech to each of the following learnings styles: Auditory linguistic,
visual linguistic, auditory numerical, visual numerical, and audio-visual-
kinesthetic combination.
2. Come up with at least two possible topics each for speeches that explain, in-
struct, demonstrate, and describe. Do some topics seem to fall naturally into
one category? Are there other topics that might be used for more than one
type of speech?
3. What is your preferred learning style? To fi nd out, go to http://www.engr.ncsu
.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html and take the “Index of Learning Styles Ques-
tionnaire” developed by Barbara A. Solomon and Richard A. Felder of North
Carolina State.

Notes

1. Jay Mathews, Escalante: The Best Teacher in America (New York: Henry Holt,
1988), 191.
2. Stand and Deliver, director Tom Menendez, with Edward James Olmos, Lou
Diamond Phillips, Rosana De Soto, and Andy Garcia, An American Play-
house Theatrical Film, A Menendez/Musca & Olmos Production, Warner
Bros., 1988.

3. P. Friedman and R. Alley, “Learning/Teaching Styles: Applying the Princi-
ples,” Theory Into Practice, 23 (1984): 77–81. Based on R. Dunn and K. Dunn,
Teaching Students Through Their Individual Learning Styles: A Practical Approach
(Reston, VA: Reston Publishing, 1978).
4. Michael D. Scott and Scott Elliot, “Innovation in the Classroom: Toward a
Reconceptualization of Instructional Communication” (paper presented at
the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Dallas,
Texas, 1983).
5. “Reagan Calls for Increased Stem Cell Research,” CNN.Com Inside
Politics, 28 July 2004. [Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2004/
ALLPOLITICS/07/27/dems.reagan/, 11 August 2004.]
6. Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press, 1983).

7. Jonathan Studebaker, “Speech of Self-Introduction: Who Am I?” The full
text appears in Chapter 2.
8. Jennie Rees, “Informative Speech: Mickey: A Changing Image,” California
State University, Chico, 1992.
369