I'm here on the University of Washington campus.
Now I can't tell, I don't imagine how would be able to know this,
but classes started yesterday.
So if you're walking around on this main area,
the quad, you'll see a lot of new students here very lost.
Because this campus is a new place to them, and
they don't quite know how to laid out yet.
American campus are weird in the sense that they're big sprolling places and
it's kind of sometimes to navigate your way.
But if you're going to do well, if you're going to make it on class on time,
you need to understand the campus, and that's why you need a map.
See maps are great, right?
Why?
Because maps orient you to a new space.
They help you figure out where you are.
Where am I?
I'm right here.
Thank you, map.
And they allow you to figure out where you are and where you're going.
So now why talk about this?
Well, because in your speech, your speech is a new campus to your audience,
they don't know it's orientation,
they don't know the logic of how you've laid out the key points.
So you need to provide that audience with a map of your talk,
now how do we do this in a speech?
Well, we can provide previews in the introduction that let
the audience know where we're going.
We can highlight the transitions between the main ideas in our speech.
And provide reviews in the conclusion.
It's there to help orient your audience to that new space in real time.
Now this type of arrangement talk,
when I introduce it some people are very resistant to it.
And I think they're resistant for usually three reasons and
I want to speak to those.
The first is they feel it's too blunt saying I'm going to talk about
three things.
And I'll admit sometimes arrangement talk can be rather blunt.
But I'd rather have a clear speech that had some blunt language,
than an unclear speech absent of that arrangement talk.
Second, I think people don't want to give something away.
They're worried that if they tell us what the speech is about,
it'll lose all it's mystery.
Well, speech is not a mystery novel,
we shouldn't only know what it's about when you get to the end.
You don't want your audience at the end of the speech to be like, he's a geologist,
he was talking about geology, I did not get that at all.
So you don't want that type of surprise ending, and
I'd say finally people misunderstand different speech genres so
they look at previewing in a speech and they say,
well that doesn't work in speeches, but different speeches do different things.
So a key point speech needs to be clear so it's benefits from previews, reviews, and
transition.
A wedding toast, it just needs to demonstrate emotion, right?
It would be weird if you're like, Karen and
Tracy should have a wonderful marriage for three key reasons.
To begin with, that's not the appropriate genre for that type of arrangement talk.
I will conclude by saying this is sort of like muscle memory.
You develop a sensibility for
being able to highlight the orientation, the organization of your speech.
But if you can do that it's going to make many of your key point speeches or
informative speeches, better because you can quickly orient your audience to
the topic just like a good map.
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