In an informative speech, the purpose of the speech is to explain to your audience what the program is and how it works. Let’s say you are assigned to inform an audience about a new vaccination program.
Let’s look at a real example of how an individual can accidentally go from informing to persuading. When a speaker starts encouraging people to use knowledge in a specific way, he or she is no longer informing but is persuading. Notice that the goal is not to encourage people to use that knowledge in any specific way. The most important characteristic of informative topics is that the goal is to gain knowledge. Audience members can then use this information to understand something (e.g., speech on a new technology, speech on a new virus) or to perform a new task or improve their skills (e.g., how to swing a golf club, how to assemble a layer cake). Simply put, this is about helping audience members acquire information that they do not already possess. The first general purpose that some people have for giving speeches is to inform. Modern public speaking scholars typically use a classification system of three general purposes: to inform, to persuade, and to entertain. These typologies or classification systems of public speeches serve to demonstrate that general speech purposes have remained pretty consistent throughout the history of public speaking. A general purpose refers to the broad goal in creating and delivering a speech. All these systems of identifying public speeches have been attempts at helping people determine the general purpose of their speech. Augustine of Hippo also wrote about three specific speech purposes: to teach (provide people with information), to delight (entertain people or show people false ideas), and to sway (persuade people to a religious ideology). Cicero also talked about three purposes: judicial (courtroom speech), deliberative (political speech), and demonstrative (ceremonial speech-similar to Aristotle’s epideictic). Aristotle talked about three speech purposes: deliberative (political speech), forensic (courtroom speech), and epideictic (speech of praise or blame). For this specific chapter, we are more interested in that last aspect of the definition of the word “purpose”: why we give speeches.Įver since scholars started writing about public speaking as a distinct phenomenon, there have been a range of different systems created to classify the types of speeches people may give. For example, when we talk about a speech’s purpose, we can question why a specific speech was given we can question how we are supposed to use the information within a speech and we can question why we are personally creating a speech. For the purposes of public speaking, all three can be applicable.
What do you think of when you hear the word “purpose”? Technically speaking, a purpose can be defined as why something exists, how we use an object, or why we make something.
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