How many main points do you need for your speech in a public speaking class?

Given the demands for good communication skills in the civic realm and in the workplace, a course in public speaking is perhaps more important than ever. There is no quick path to a great speech. Good speaking is developed through practice and hard work.

The public speaking course is a unique course. Unlike, say, a course in the principles of law or the history of Central Asia, the public speaking course requires you to both know content and be able to perform a skill well. You will learn important principles of public speaking and argumentation, but simply knowing these principles is insufficient; you must also be able to apply them well. By the same token, you might be able to get through a speech without saying “um,” but if the content of the speech is bad, it is not a good speech. The best public speakers not only speak smoothly, they also say important and interesting things.

HOW TO BE A STUDENT OF PUBLIC SPEAKING

The most successful model for teaching public speaking (and the one this class follows) relies on a mix of instruction, imitation, and practice.

  • Instruction reinforces the lessons learned from the history of public speaking study. The instruction in this class draws most explicitly from the rhetorical tradition. We will study principles of argumentation, arrangement, and style.
  • Imitation means that when studying a performance skill like speaking, we benefit by identifying and imitating the best practices of skilled speakers. I don’t mean stealing or plagiarizing, I mean trying to link phrases together in a manner similar to a speaker we think sounds good. There are a number of speeches that you will watch this quarter (online and in class). The intent of these speeches is to show you some best practices. You shouldn’t simply watch a speech like you would a television show; you should look to find some verbal or nonverbal behaviors that you would like to be able to imitate.
  • Practice is the most obvious leg of public speaking study. If you are going to get better at public speaking, you must be able to apply the lessons of instruction and imitation by practicing your speeches. The nice thing about public speaking is that you can practice it almost anywhere. However, your practice time is best spent by speaking in situations where you have an attentive audience (as opposed to a curious dog or a sleeping roommate).

How many main points do you need for your speech in a public speaking class?

MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT PUBLIC SPEAKING

  1. You can’t learn to be a good public speaker; you have to be born a naturally good speaker. Everyone can become a better public speaker through study and practice. I love to ski. I wasn’t born being a good skier; rather, I grew up skiing. I skied as often as I could and I got better. The same is true of public speaking. You were born with the basic equipment needed for speaking in public—lungs and a mouth.
  1. I can only learn public speaking through practice alone. This misconception often works in conjunction with the misconception #1 and #3. I see this as a hugely egoistic argument since it assumes that only you know what good public speaking is and only you know how to improve. Let me return to the skiing analogy (though you could substitute any sports or skills analogy, like playing a musical instrument). Most people develop their skiing ability by simply skiing a lot. But if you want to get better, you need to seek outside information about the principles of skiing. That’s why people pay a lot of money for ski lessons. Ski instructors can both model good skiing behaviors and they can talk about the physics of metal on snow and the physiology of your muscles on skis.
  1. Public speaking is just delivery (speech content doesn’t matter). This is like saying that a good essay is simply one that has good grammar or punctuation. A good essay should have good grammar and punctuation, but it also needs good content. The same holds true of a speech. When we listen to a speech we judge the speaker according to what they say as well as how they say it. Think about presidential debates. After any presidential debate, pundits flood the airwaves and pick apart both content and delivery, but they spend far more time discussing what the candidates said.
  1. Reading a speech is the best way to ensure a good speech. You will hear me talking a lot about the similarities between writing and speaking, but they also differ in many important respects. A speech is an act of communication with a specific audience. Reading a speech undermines this (and as we will see, can actually make you more nervous). If you were having a conversation with a friend about your classes and suddenly started reading a prepared set of comments, the conversation would sink. Why? A conversation is dynamic and relies on communicating with the other person. A speech is like a conversation in this way, you are engaging in a shared act of communication with the audience.

RHETORIC

A class on public speaking is essentially a rhetoric class. The word rhetoric is often used to indicate that the speaker is lying (“his record doesn’t match his rhetoric”) or that the speaker is filling air with meaningless talk (“let’s move past all the rhetoric and get down to business”). It is true that term has gotten a lot of bad press over the past 2,000 years or so, but the study of rhetoric is the study of what is persuasive. We are certainly not the first group to study what goes into a dynamic and persuasive speech. The ancient Greeks and Romans spent a lot of time thinking and writing about good speaking. Throughout history, thinkers and charlatans alike have devoted a considerable amount of effort to figuring out what sounds good, looks good, and works to motivate various audiences.

DEFINITIONS OF RHETORIC  

Since the study of rhetoric has been around for so many years, there are a number of different definitions for the word. Aristotle defined rhetoric as “the faculty of discovering in any particular case the available means of persuasion.” Plato held that rhetoric is “the art of winning the soul by discourse.” The Roman thinker Quintilian suggested simply that rhetoric is the art of speaking well. John Locke however held a dimmer view of the art and wrote that rhetoric is a “powerful instrument of error and deceit.” The contemporary writer Gerard Hauser suggests, “Rhetoric is communication that attempts to coordinate social action. For this reason, rhetorical communication is explicitly pragmatic. Its goal is to influence human choices on specific matters that require immediate attention.”

For the purposes of this class, we will define rhetoric as “the study and art of effective speaking.” This doesn’t begin to capture all the ways in which rhetoric could be (and has been) defined, but it does focus our study on the aspects of rhetoric most relevant to our present concern.

How many main points should speeches have?

1. Most speeches should have two to four main points. a. Students do not have time in classroom speeches to develop more than four main points.

Should every speech have 3 main points?

remember all of your ideas and their connections. Most speakers should work to limit themselves to 3-5 main ideas which are organized in a clear pattern that is highlighted for the audience. together, defining the connections and relationships between the major elements of the speech.

What are the 3 main points of a speech?

Each speech should be structured with three major parts: introduction, body, and conclusion.

How many P's are required for public speaking?

The 7 P's of Public Speaking.