The Speech Outline

Writing a Speech Outline

After you're done choosing a speech topic, the next step in writing your speech is creating a speech outline. Simply put, an outline is little more than an organized list of the key points you want to make.

The biggest benefit--and most critical component--of a speech outline is that it makes you organize your thoughts. You'll also have to start assigning prioorities to everything you want to say.

Writing a speech outline isn't really tough. Here's the basic procedure.

Start by asking yourself these questions:

• What is the goal of my speech?
• What do I want my listeners to learn from it?
• What do I want them to think or do after they hear it?

As an example:

If you're trying to raise support a charity or cause, your goal might be to motivate people to become volunteers ot donors.

Brainstorm themes that would help you reach your goal. For instance, if you were trying to raise awareness and support for the local Children's Hospital, you could talk about the importance of children's health to the future of the community.

Do some additional brainstorming by listing the most interesting or important things about your topic that will relate to your audience.

Write down your on 3x5 index cards or small sheets of paper. You can include include facts and statistics, but also be sure to include relevant anecdotes, quotes and good stories.

Once you've written your key points on the 3x5 cards, choose the ones that are related and pile them in separate stacks.

Sort and edit the cards. Toss out those you don't think are important enough to mention in the time you'll have.

At this point, you've got the elements for a beginning, a middle and an end to your speech. But you're not quite done with your outline yet.

Now you'll need to think about which material you'll use to open your speech, and which material you'll use to to close it. These are two extremely critical sections that deserve a lot of attention.

Once you know how you want to open and close stack the rest of your categorized cards in a logical order.

There's one more step.

Consider how you might work in natural transitions between the points on your cards. This will help your speech flow smoothly from one subject to another. Write down your transitions on their own cards, and insert them appropriately them appropriately between stacks.

It will be up to you whether to write out your speech word for word using your outline, or just to "ad lib" from the cards themselves. But either way, your speech is much more likely to succeed because you've taken the time to think about what you want to say, organize it, and write it down in the form of a speech outline.

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