Your starting point
The first thing you should do is create an overview of what your speech should look like. How? Using the Purpose - Audience - Format checklist. Before starting to write any speech, consider this:
Purpose:
Why am I giving this speech?
What is the end goal?
Is there anything specific I'm meant to achieve?
Am I arguing for something?
Am I trying to persuade my audience?
Am I entertaining people?
Am I informing the audience about something I find interesting
Audience:
Who is my audience?
What do they enjoy?
What are they interested in?
How formal do they expect my speech to be?
How exciting do they expect my speech to be?
How funny do they expect my speech to be?
What level of vocabulary do they understand?
Format:
What type of speech am I giving?
What is special about this speech type?
Am I meant to include props?
How informative is this speech meant to be?
Am I meant to include statistics?
Am I meant to include humor?
Start your research
Keeping your purpose, audience, and format in mind, start researching your speech. You likely know what you're giving a speech about, so start your research very broadly. Read about the topic and note down anything that seems relevant or interesting. Make sure you're saving your sources so that you can come back to them later!
Remember, you always need to be aware of the purpose, audience, and format of your speech, especially when first planning it out. If you're meant to give a funny and entertaining speech, note down any funny anecdotes you find. If it's meant to be persuasive or argumentative, look for good points and find evidence to back up your points.
Sources for research
Academic journals
Articles
Documentaries
Books
Interviews
Official reports
Speeches
Basic speech structure
The general structure of a speech is, unsurprisingly: beginning, middle, and end. That's not very helpful though, so let's go into the details of speech structure:
Beginning:
Say something interesting to hook your reader (more on this in the next Public Speaking 101 article)
Give your thesis statement - what will your speech be about?
Signpost your speech. This won't be necessary for short speeches (<3 minutes), but this is absolutely essential for anything longer than 3 minutes. Lay out your points and the content of your speech.
Middle:
Your point. There isn't much structure within the middle of the speech because all speeches will have a different point. This is where you deliver most of the information or arguments of your speech. We'll talk more about strengthening the middle of your speech in another Public Speaking 101 article.
End:
Summarise what you just said. This won't be necessary if your speech is shorter than two minutes, but if it's longer, remind your audience what you talked about.
Leave the audience with something to think about - this can be through a quote, a question, or a thought.
Say thank you!
Non-traditional speech structure
There's also a couple of ways to structure your speech that isn't traditional, but they generally follow a similar format to the traditional beginning-middle-end structure. However, unlike the traditional structure, they don't work perfectly for all speeches, so make sure that, if you do choose to use a non-traditional structure, you're tailoring the structure to your speech.
Past - present - future: this structure can be used when talking about a problem, a person, or an event.
Cause - effect - solution: this structure can be used when talking about a problem or when giving an inspirational speech
Before - during - result: this structure can be used when talking about a historical event or when analyzing a policy.
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