Top List List

Some ways to quickly generate a list of ideas for a speech include

Choosing a Topic

When choosing your speech topic, brainstorm to generate many ideas, and distill those ideas to find your singular topic.

Learning Objectives

Discuss different strategies for choosing a speech topic

Key Takeaways

Key Points

Before you can begin writing your speech, you must first establish the main topic about which you plan to speak.
Brainstorm early and often! You can try a variety of techniques to get your mental juices flowing, from clustering to free writing. Even just talking through your ideas with another person as a sounding board is a great way to get ideas.
Once you start to get an idea of your topic, do a little preliminary research. See what others may have written or said about your general topic; reading their ideas may help give you some new ideas or directions of your own.

Key Terms

distill: To extract the essence of; concentrate; purify.
brainstorming: A method of problem solving in which individuals or members of a group contribute ideas spontaneously.
topic: Subject; theme; a category or general area of interest.

Choose Your Topic

Clustering: An example of an idea cluster for the subject “gardening.”

As you begin to prepare for any speech, it’s important to pin down exactly about what you plan to talk. You might have been given a specific topic by a professor or supervisor, or you may be simply invited to speak at an event where the topic is up to you. Knowing how to carefully select your topic is an important first step in preparing for a successful speech.

Start by thinking about your venue. Where will you be giving your speech? To whom will you be speaking? (We’ll get to analyzing your audience in the next section. ) Then, start to think about what you know about the topic, and move towards those subjects or tangents about which you don’t know. It’s helpful to speak about a topic with which you are already familiar, but sometimes you may be called into situations where you have no prior knowledge about a given subject.

In either instance, it’s helpful to approach your topic through brainstorming.

Brainstorming

One of the best ways to help solidify your speech topic is to brainstorm. You can brainstorm by yourself, or you might want to bring in a few friends, colleagues or classmates to help you come up with ideas in a group setting. You can brainstorm using a number of different exercises.

Word Association

Start with a broad topic idea. What words, topics, or other subjects do you associate with that first topic? Now what words, topics, or other subjects do you associate with the following word? Continue this chain of word association to give you a broad spectrum of ideas.

Clustering

Also known as mind-mapping, clustering gives your word association a visual form. Start with your main idea and draw a circle around it, thinking of it like the hub of a wheel. Now, begin to write other associated ideas, topics, or subcategories related to that main topic around the hub, and connect them as separate spokes. From each spoke, begin to jot down other associated ideas and thoughts. As your cluster begins to grow, you might want to connect smaller spokes to one another and create new links between subjects.

Freewriting

This is probably the simplest brainstorm method of all. Set a timer and begin writing whatever thoughts or ideas come to mind about your particular subject. You might find it easier to type your freewriting instead of writing it by hand, so you can keep up with your thoughts faster. Whatever you do, don’t stop writing.

Another way of freewriting is to record yourself talking for a set period of time and then transcribing your key points to go back to and clarify later. Once your time is up, go back and highlight or circle relevant points or topics that stick out for you. You’ll refine these later.

Distill Your Ideas into One Topic

Once you’ve brainstormed your many ideas, it’s time to refine your ideas and distill them into one topic. Look for themes, patterns, and commonalities when going through your brainstorming notes. Use these themes to help guide you toward a singular topic.

Do a Little Homework

While you will definitely research your topic, you might want to do some “presearch” – that is, a little research before the real research. Do a quick scan to see what others have said or written about your topic. This might give you even more ideas of how to refine and distill your topic, or more appropriately adapt it to your audience or venue.

The Importance of Choosing a Good Topic

Choosing a good topic is an essential step towards delivering an effective speech.

Learning Objectives

Explain the importance of selecting the right topic

Key Takeaways

Key Points

When you tell a story, you want your audience to be engaged, so you choose a topic that will interest your audience. The same goes for speech giving.

Key Terms

topic: Subject; theme; a category or general area of interest.

Tips for Choosing a Topic

When you tell a story, you want your audience to be engaged, so you choose a topic that will interest your audience. The same goes for speech giving.When you choose a topic, consider your audience. Ask yourself: What topic, or subject, will engage the audience?

If you are unsure what topic to choose, consider the following:

current events (newspapers, other media)
personal experience
your hobbies– Does your audience have an understanding of the basics of your hobby or the terms used in it?
your work–Are there things that you have learned through your work that would be useful to people who are not familiar with your profession?
books you may have read recently

The trick is to be as relevant as you can to the audience who is listening to you.

Helpful Hints for Preparing Your Main Points

Now that we’ve discussed how to take a specific purpose and turn it into a series of main points, here are some helpful hints for creating your main points.

Uniting Your Main Points

Once you’ve generated a possible list of main points, you want to ask yourself this question: “When you look at your main points, do they fit together?” For example, if you look at the three preceding main points (school districts use software in their operations; what is open-source software; name some specific open-source software packages that may be appropriate for these school administrators to consider), ask yourself, “Do these main points help my audience understand my specific purpose?”

Suppose you added a fourth main point about open-source software for musicians—would this fourth main point go with the other three? Probably not. While you may have a strong passion for open-source music software, that main point is extraneous information for the speech you are giving. It does not help accomplish your specific purpose, so you’d need to toss it out.

7 STEPS TO PICK A PERFECT SPEECH TOPIC

Panic – the pressure is on! You are staring at a blank sheet of paper or a blank document on your computer, your stomach is churning due to the looming speech delivery date and you just don’t know what to talk about!

This is the reality for so many budding and even experienced speakers. There is a limited time to prepare a speech and yet a disproportionate chunk of this time gets absorbed in trying to nail down the best speech topic. This then has a negative knock on effect on writing the speech and the quality of practice achievable given the limited time left.

Before writing any speech selecting the right speech topic can be a painful, drawn out and tedious process. The good news is that it does not have to be! With our Public Speaking for Life guide on how to select a speech topic you can narrow down the right speech topic for you without wasting time!

Regardless of the nature of the event, meeting or occasion you have volunteered or been forced to speak at, there are certain steps that you can take every time when selecting a topic.

Step 1:Identify the nature of the speaking event and purpose behind it

Finding out what the nature of the speaking event is and the primary purpose behind it can really help in narrowing down a topic which is relevant and fit for purpose. It may seem very obvious yet there are speakers who get caught out by preparing a speech they think is on a suitable topic only to find out moments before delivery that the speech topic is not going to hit the mark. Don’t make a wild assumption and know this basic information from the outset. It can save embarrassment on stage and can really help narrow down your search for the right topic.

Step 2:Know your audience

You may not know a single sole when you stand up in front of a particular audience but there are commonalities between the individuals that make up any audience. This can be as simple as the one reason why they are all sitting in the same room listening to you. Common characteristics can include but are not limited to – age, gender, beliefs, seniority, education, hobbies, experience, ethnicity and employment. Being aware of the commonalities of your audience can assist in selecting a topic that is relevant.

Step 3:Think of your personal interests, knowledge and experiences

Here comes the fun part! It is now all about you as the speaker. Bearing in mind the nature of the speaking event and your audience, what relevant topics are of personal interest to you? As a speaker if you are genuinely interested in your speech topic it makes researching, writing and delivering it so much more enjoyable. What topics do you already have knowledge on and/or have you had experiences that your audience can learn from? During this step the brainstorming is kicking in and the ideas are starting to bob up to the surface.

Step 4:Identify any relevant latest news

Picking the right topic means it needs to be relevant. Relevance means it needs to be current. Has there has been an explosion of media on a particular topic that is of interest to both you and your audience? Doing some high level research at this point can assist greatly in identifying relevant topics that are at the forefront of the minds of those in the audience and that you find interesting. During this research process it could be that you may not identify an overarching topic and you may simple stumble over supporting facts/stories/ ideas that assist in driving the topic selection process.

Step 5:Brainstorm all possible ideas

With your think tank full of a range of ideas it is time now to brainstorm and document all your ideas no matter how wild or ridiculous any one of them may seem. Documenting all your topic ideas is powerful in ensuring all possibilities have been considered. It may be helpful at this stage to bounce your ideas off somebody else as talking about them can often lead to even more topic ideas that you may otherwise not identify. There is no hard or fast rule as to how many topic ideas you should have but your limitation in most instances is usually time.

Step 6:Make a short list of possible topics

Here comes crunch time. Now it is time to review the list and narrow it down to three topic finalists. Consider all the factors in the steps above and be ruthless. Now is the time for harsh elimination. Which of your ideas are the most relevant to the speaking event? Which ideas are likely to be most appealing to your audience? Which topic do you know most about and find interesting? Are there any hot topics that are bound to be a crowd pleaser? At this stage you need to go with your gut instinct and not spend hours debating.

Step 7:Make a decision and commit to it

A decision now must be made and then you need to stick to it. When you review your short list of finalists there may be one topic that just leaps out at you, you find yourself naturally bonding with it and the speech is beginning to write itself in your mind. When this happens you have hit the jack pot and the speech writing process can commence. However, if you are struggling to make a nail biting decision, one recommendation is to draft a high level speech outline bullet point style for each of the short listed topics. When identifying the key points in the body of each speech outline, the topic that is the easiest and the quickest to craft is most likely the one you know most about and find the most interesting! Bingo – speech topic has been selected.

With your speech topic identified it is time now to dive into the speech writing process.