What’s the purpose of your speech?

When preparing a speech your approach depends a lot on why you are giving the speech. And we are not talking about the speech your boss is making you give because he is to lazy to do it himself.

To really give a good presentation, you must know the purpose of your speech. By identifying what the purpose of your speech is and how you want the audience to respond to your presentation, you have a lot of information both on what kind of content to use and on your attitude and “approach” when you actually get ready to deliver your speech.

There are very basic reasons to speaking in public. The purpose of your speech is either to inform, to educate, to entertain or to convince the audience to take action. Many speakers you hear do a combination of these motivations. A sermon is there to inspire, which is a mixture of convincing and to causing action. A lecture in school is to educate and if you get lucky, the teacher will at least try to entertain you.

So – the first thing to ask yourself when you have your topic and your audience is – “What do I want my audience to respond to my presentation?”

If you want them to walk away with new information that makes them smarter people, you will speak to inform. If you want them to laugh and have a great time, you are out to entertain. If you want them to go out and use your web site, to join your political party or stop hurting the ozone layer, the objective of your speech is to convince them to take action.

You will not necessarily announce when you start speaking what your objective is. Sometimes it’s obvious. If you are addressing your class at school, its obvious you are there to educate the students. But you may also be looking to convince them to live their lifes a certain way or to take some other action with the information you are giving. A speech to entertain is very often also a very softly worded sermon on behavior. Just watch any comedian and you will hear small snippets of philosophy such as “people, we are all the same, we just have to learn to live together” in the middle of the comedy set. That comic is actually out to convince you to change your outlook and behavior and using comedy as the tool to that end.

These are all very valid adaptations on the basic forms of a speech. To make sure your talk reaches its primary purpose, lay down the outline or the “skeleton” of the speech with your purpose in mind. You might even “reverse engineer” your speech by writing the conclusion first. The conclusion might be, “And so ladies and gentlemen, I hope you can see that using mass transit will do a lot to help the ozone layer”. From there you can back up into the body of the speech and lay down, again at the skeleton layer what your three points of the body of your speech is.

With that skeleton done, you can go back and start writing the speech from the beginning and use any or all of the public speaking approaches to layer that on top of the purpose for the talk. You can use humor, motivational quotes, stories, urban myths or facts from history to help your speech be fun, compelling and attention grabbing.

If by the end of your speech you can tell you hit that primary goal, then your speech was well constructed. And a well constructed speech is easier to give. It is also easier for your audience to hear so everybody wins.