Speeches have two types of structure. First, they should include three main parts: introduction, body, and conclusion.
The introduction of the speech establishes the first, crucial contact between you and your audience. For classroom speeches, it should last less than a minute. The introduction needs to accomplish three things:
1) Focus your audience's attention. The introduction is the place where you should state your main claim or idea very clearly and give the audience a sense of what you aim to do or accomplish in the speech. You need to orient your audience and make connections between what they know or are already interested in and what you are speaking on.
2) Establish goodwill and credibility. Aristotle believed the most important part of persuasion was ethos, or the character the speaker exhibited to the audience. Your audience needs to see you as someone to listen to attentively and sympathetically. You need to appear reliable to make that happen. Ethos is generated by both delivery or style and ideas. Making eye contact with your audience and displaying confidence in your voice and body are two important ways to establish ethos. In addition, if you express ideas that are original and intelligent, you will show what Aristotle would consider your intellectual character. You are displaying habits of thought to an audience which sees something interesting and worth listening to with trust.
3) Give a preview where you mention the main points you will cover in the body so that the audience can be prepared to listen for them. Repetition is an important aspect of public speaking, for listening is an imperfect art, and audience members nearly always tune out in parts--sometimes to think about your speech, sometimes for other reasons. The preview should end with a transition, a brief phrase or a pause to signal to your audience that you are moving out of the introduction and into the body.
The body
follows and is itself structured by a mode of organization,
a logical or culturally specific pattern of thinking about ideas, events,
objects, and processes. Having a mode of organization means grouping similar
material together and linking the component parts together with transitions.
Good transitions show the relation between parts of a speech. They display your logic. Common transition phrases include: in addition to, furthermore, even more, next, after that, then, as a result, beyond that, in contrast:, however, on the other hand. One special type of transition is called the internal summary, a brief nutshell restatement of the main point you are completing.
In the body, the fewer the main points the better. For short classroom speeches, under 10 minutes, you shouldn't have more than three main points. For longer speeches, you probably don't want more than five. Beyond that, audiences will have trouble following and remembering your speech. In the speech, main points should be clearly stated and signposted, marked off as distinct and important to your audience. Transitions often serve to signpost new points, as do pauses before an important idea. Additionally, you might number your main points--first, second, third or first, next, finally. Always make it easy for your audience to recognize and follow key ideas you don't want them to miss.
There are several common modes of organizing the information in the body of your speech:
>>Temporal organization groups information according to when it happened or will happen. Types of temporal patterns include chronological (in the sequence it occurred) and reversechronological (from ending back to start). Inquiry order is one special mode of temporal organization useful in presenting some kinds of research: here you organize the body in accord with the unfolding processes of thinking and gathering data, taking the audience from your initial curiosity and questions to your final results.Following a transition, the conclusion follows. The conclusion should be somewhat shorter than your introduction and needs to accomplish two purposes: sum up your main ideas and give the speech a sense of closure and completion. Good conclusions might refer back to the introduction, offer an analogy or metaphor which captures the main idea, or leave the audience with a question or a challenge of some type. Brief quotations can also make effective conclusions (just as they can make effective openings for introductions).
>>Cause-effect is a related mode of organization, showing how one event brings about another. Cause-effect, like other temporal modes, may be used for past, present, or future events and processes. Cause-effect can also be reversed, from effect back to cause.
>>Spatial patterns group and organize your speech based on physical arrangement of its parts. If you are describing a place, a physical object, or a process of movement--downtown Mercer, a plant cell, or the Battle of Shiloh--spatial patterns can be useful.
>>Topical designs are appropriate when your subject matter has clear categories of division. Government in the United States, for instance, falls into federal, state, and local categories; or into executive, legislative, and judicial branches; into elected and appointed officials. Categories like these can help you divide your subject matter and organize the main points of your body.
>>Compare/contrast takes two or more entities and draws attention to their differences and/or similarities. Sometimes you may find it easiest to explain a difficult subject by comparing it with a easier, more accessible one--to explain nuclear fusion with the stages of high school romance, for instance. In other words, you may want to use analogies.