If you find yourself starting to phrase your specific purpose as a question, ask yourself how you can reword it as a statement. Specific purposes should be statements, not questions. As an example, “My specific purpose is to persuade the students in my residence hall to protest the proposed housing cost increase” is a specific statement of purpose, while “My speech will be about why we should protest the proposed housing cost increase” is not. Then complete your statement of purpose with a prepositional phrase (a phrase using “to,” “about,” “by,” or another preposition) that summarizes your topic. Follow this by a capsule description of your audience (my peers in class, a group of kindergarten teachers, etc.). To form a clear and succinct statement of the specific purpose of your speech, start by naming your general purpose (to inform, to persuade, or to entertain). First, a specific purpose, in its written form, should be a short, declarative sentence that emphasizes the main topic of your speech. Once you’ve determined the who, what, when, where, and why aspects of your topic, it’s time to start creating your actual specific purpose. If it’s a topic that’s a little more off-the-wall, you’ll really need to think about why they should care. Why does your audience need to hear your speech? If your audience doesn’t care about your specific purpose, they are less likely to attend to your speech. The last question you need to answer within your speech is why. Are you giving a speech in front of a classroom? A church? An executive meeting? Depending on the location of your speech, different topics may or may not be appropriate. but may not have the same impact if you’re giving it at 4:00 p.m.įourth, you need to consider where your speech will be given. For example, explaining the importance of eating breakfast and providing people with cereal bars may be a great topic at 9:00 a.m. Different speeches may be better for different times of the day. ![]() Third, you need to consider when your speech will be given. When picking an effective topic, you need to make sure that the topic is appropriate for a variety of constraints or limitations within a speaking context. Second is the “what” question, or the basic description of your topic. Keeping your audience first and foremost in your thoughts when choosing a specific purpose will increase the likelihood that your audience will find your speech meaningful. Different audiences, as discussed in the chapter on audience analysis, have differing desires, backgrounds, and needs. First, you want to know who is going to be in your audience. Now, when discussing specific purposes, we are concerned with who, what, when, where, why, and how questions for your speech. Notice that in each of these cases, the general purpose alters the topic, but all three are still fundamentally about hygiene. You could still give a speech about hygiene no matter what your general purpose is, but the specific purpose would vary depending on whether the general purpose is to inform (discussing hygiene practices around the globe), to persuade (discussing why people need to adopt a specific hygiene practice), or to entertain (discussing some of the strange and unique hygiene practices that people have used historically). For example, let’s say you want to give a speech about hygiene. Obviously, depending on the general purpose, you will have a range of different types of topics. Once you know whether your goal is to inform, persuade, or entertain, picking an appropriate topic is easier. ![]() First, you need to have a general purpose. When attempting to get at the core of your speech (the specific purpose), you need to know a few basic things about your speech.
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