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13: Creating Your Speech Outlines

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The Fun of Outlining

Learning Objectives

After studying this chapter, the student will be able to:

  • Differentiate the different types of organizational patterns;
  • Choose an organizational pattern that is most logical to the speech’s specific purpose;
  • Use connective statements that will help the audience understand the logic and structure of a speech;
  • Construct an outline for an extemporaneous speech following the introduction, body, and conclusion format.

When you are talking informally with friends, family, or colleagues your conversation might follow a haphazard course. You can jump from topic to topic or omit certain information and your audience will probably understand you.  But a public speech must not do so. Even in conversations with your friends, you might believe they understand what you mean, but they might not. In a prepared speech, you must be attentive to reasoning in logical steps so that your audience understands the meaning you intend to convey. This is where your outline helps. It is a simple guide that can lead to great success.

Think of an outline as a skeleton you must assemble bone by bone, gradually making it take form into a coherent whole. Or think of it as a puzzle in which you must put all the pieces in their correct places in order to see the full picture. Or think of it as a game of solitaire in which the right cards must follow a legitimate sequence in order for you to win. Or a blueprint used to create the tallest skyscraper.

This means, of course, that there are no shortcuts, but there are helpful strategies. If you leave a bone out of a skeleton, something will fall apart. By the same token, if you omit a step in reasoning, your speech will be vulnerable to lapses in logic, lapses in the evidence you need to make your case, and the risk of becoming a disjointed, disorienting message.

The more fully you appreciate the outline as both rule-bound and creative, the more fully you will experience its usefulness and its power to deliver your message in a unified, coherent way.

Unless otherwise indicated images throughout this chapter are licensed by Pexels


This page titled 13: Creating Your Speech Outlines is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Lisa Coleman, Thomas King, & William Turner.

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