COM 1100 Chapter Notes - Chapter 14: Operational Definition
Chapter 14: Informative Speaking
Chapter Outcomes:
1. What are the goals of informative speaking?
2. What are the eight categories of informative speeches?
3. What are the four major approaches to informative speeches?
4. What are some strategies to make your audience hungry for information?
5. How can you structure speech to make it easy to listen to?
I. The goals of Informative Speaking
a. Informative speaking: a form of public speaking intended to increase the
audience’s understanding or knowledge
b. Meeting the Audience’s informational needs
i. Gauge what the audience already knows
ii. Decide on an appropriate approach to the topic
iii. Make the topic relevant to each member of that audience
c. Informing, not persuading
i. Objective: it presents facts and information in a straightforward and
evenhanded way, free of influence from the speaker’s personal thoughts or
opinion
ii. Subjective: it presents facts and information from a particular point of
view
iii. Table 14.1
II. Topics for informative presentations
a. People
b. Places
c. Objects and Phenomena
d. Processes
e. Concepts
f. Issues
g. Plan and policies
III. Approaches to Conveying information
a. Descriptive presentation: an approach to conveying information that involves
painting a mental picture for the audience
b. Demonstration speeches: answers “how” questions by showing an audience the
way something works
c. Definitional speeches: a presentation whose main goal is to provide answers to
“what: questions by explaining to an audience what something is
i. Operational definition: defines something by explaining what it is or what
it does
ii. Negation: defines something by telling what it is not
iii. Example: defines something by offering concrete examples of what it is
iv. synonym: defines something by using words that mean almost the same
thing
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