7 Organizing

Selecting and constructing an advocacy argument can be tough. But as we’ve discussed, a well-reasoned, researched, and constructed argument is key to effectively crafting and conveying information. The process, however, doesn’t stop there. The next step is determining how to organize that information so that the audience can follow along.

Organizing information and reflecting on the best way to communicate an idea isn’t unique to a public speech; we do it all the time in private. Consider the following scenario:

Two college roommates – Anne and Stevie– have been dealing with interpersonal conflict. They can’t get along. Stevie decides that it’s time to sit down and tell Anne how they’re feeling, but first, she jots some notes. “Where to start?” she thinks, and tries to consider how she wants to breach the topic. “From the first time I was upset?” “Should I talk generally about the main 2 issues that keep bothering me?” “How do I start?”

Stevie is trying to process how to organize the information that she’ll present to Anne – the main audience member. She’s also processing the best way to start – or to introduce – that information to her friend, and outlining key ideas that she wants to remember.

The same is true for preparing arguments in a speech. Having your information in a well-organized manner can make or break audience understanding of your content. In this chapter, we discuss ways to effectively categorize your information that will a) support your thesis statement, and b) increase audience comprehension of that information. To accomplish these tasks, we will consider different ways of grouping your information and provide strategies for writing effective introductions, conclusions, and transitions. To begin, let’s discuss the purpose and goals of organization.

The Purpose of Organization

The ultimate purposes of organization are to serve your audience’s needs and to inspire them to become civically engaged. When we refer to the audience in this chapter, we are talking about your direct audience. In chapter 2, we defined the direct audience as the people who are exposed to and attend to your speech. The needs of your audience, who are giving you their time and attention, should motivate you to thoughtfully organize your speech. Clearly presenting complex or unfamiliar issues enables your audience to better think through pressing public concerns.

But how do you know when your speech is well organized? We’ll next explain the four goals a speech fulfills when it is well organized. Afterward, we’ll consider how organizing your speech can help you tighten and hone your ideas.

Four Goals of a Well-Organized Speech

There are at least four goals for a well-organized speech: make the speech easy to follow, coherent, engaging, and well timed. You might think of these as benefits—for you as a speaker and for the audience—when accomplished.

Easy to Follow

The first goal is to make the speech easy to follow. Audiences should be able to easily identify the thesis and distinguish the speech’s major elements—often an introduction, main points, and conclusion. Instead of laboring to figure out where you are in a speech, your audience should be able to focus on your ideas instead. A well-organized speech also gives the speaker confidence; you can more easily remember the main points because each is clear and distinct. Thus, you can focus your energy on delivering the ideas, which allows you to give a more fluent and compelling presentation.

Coherent

Second, a well-organized speech should cohere as a presentation. That is, effective structure should draw connections between ideas. Major speech elements should flow logically from one part to the next. The audience should easily understand how the main points support or lead to the thesis. Speech content coheres when it makes sense together and leads to a compelling conclusion. Furthermore, a well-organized speech improves the case you are making. If listeners can easily see the connections between ideas, they may find your line of reasoning more convincing.

Engaging

Third, an organized speech is more engaging because it’s more interesting and memorable for the audience. A cleverly structured speech can offer the audience a new and interesting way of approaching an issue or understanding the merits of a particular approach or solution. Similarly, taking time to carefully craft your introduction and conclusion can effectively draw your audience in with a desire to learn more.

Box 7.1 Using Organization to Make Your Speech More Engaging

Imagine advocating for a food pantry to be built on your campus for students. How might you organize your speech? You could name three benefits it will provide: easy accessibility, free food, and recognition of many students’ financial pressures. That might be easy to follow but rather boring.

Alternatively, that same topic could be organized by first establishing the prominence of anxiety and depression among college students. Next you could identify hunger caused by food insecurity as a contributing factor to students’ anxiety and depression. Following that you might offer your solution of an on-campus food pantry. This three-point structure could more effectively intrigue the audience by drawing attention to the connections between food insecurity and mental health challenges.

When a speech’s organization is interesting, it is also typically memorable. An audience member may report after listening to your speech, “She first explained the problem, then identified a cause of the problem, and advocated for her preferred solution.” Or “He started by sharing his own family’s struggles with food insecurity, which immediately drew me into the speech.” A well-organized speech tends to enable active listening, whereas a jumbled speech tends to elicit passive listening (at best) from an audience.

Well Timed

Finally, an organized speech is well timed. In other words, its length meets the audience’s expectations and the requirements posed by the context. Speakers who talk without first organizing the content (in a “stream-of-consciousness” fashion) are more likely to talk too long or too briefly, or they may misappropriate how they spend time within their speech. Carefully attending to a speech’s organization should avoid those pitfalls and satisfy the timing expected for the occasion and by the audience.

The best speeches utilize organizational structures that meet all four goals. When any one goal is unmet, the speech’s success will suffer. A speech that is engaging and impactful but hard to follow, for example, may leave the audience wondering what they just heard. A speech that is easy to follow but poorly timed or boring, on the other hand, may lose the audience’s attention before it ends. Few speakers develop an effective organizational method the first time they write or outline their speech. Instead, they typically follow a more recursive pattern.

The Recursive Nature of Organization

The remainder of this chapter provides steps to organize your speech. Although they appear straightforward or linear, your process will likely be more recursive—that is, circular. The process moves forward and backward; it circles back on itself. You may write a thesis statement and then craft an introduction that leads up to it. You may develop your main points but discover that your focus evolved and you need to go back and revise your thesis.

Expect this recursivity as you draft your speech. The best speakers find themselves honing or tightening their ideas throughout the process of organizing them. Whatever your approach looks like, keep in mind that speeches need a clear purpose and central claim (thesis) to be successful. One way to get started thinking about the most effective organization of your speech is to consider how you might categorize or group chunks of information.

Grouping

Have you ever organized a garage sale? The first step, before putting up signs or pricing items, is to go through your closets and garage and create “piles” of items that you want to sell: children’s items, tools, kitchen items, furniture, trash, etc. Researchers have found that “chunking” information, that is, the way it is grouped, is vital to audience understanding, learning, and retention of information (Beighly, 1954; Bodeia, Powers, & Fitch-Hauser, 2006; Daniels & Whitman, 1981).

As we listen, we have limits as to how many categories of information we can keep in mind. In public speaking, use approximately 3 categories to group your information. 2-3 main points – or groups – is safe territory, and you should avoiding having more than 5 main points for an audience to track.

“How does this work in practice?” you may be asking. “How do I group information to find my categories?”

Use your research and your brainstorming tactics! As you research, look at the articles and websites yougm read and say, “That information relates to what I read over here” and, “That statistic fits under the idea of . . .” You are looking for similarities and patterns. Think back to the yard sle example – you would group according to customer interest and the purpose of each item. As you learn more about your topic and expand your expertise, the patterns and groups will become clearer.

Once you locate a pattern, that information can likely be grouped into your speech’s main points. Return to your thesis statement and determine what groups are more suitable to support your specific purpose. If you continue to find more groups, you may want to limit and narrow your topic down further.

Finally, because your audience will understand you better and perceive you as organized, you will gain more credibility as a speaker if you are organized, assuming you also have credible information and acceptable delivery (Slagell, 2013; Sharp & McClung, 1966).

After you group, the next step is determining what type of organizational pattern works best.

Patterns of Organization

At this point, you should see how much your audience needs organized ideas. You also know that as you do research, you will group together similar pieces of information from different sources. As you group your research information, you will want to make sure that your grouped content is adhering to your specific purpose statement.

Interestingly, there are some standard ways of organizing these categories, which are called “patterns of organization.” Our list isn’t exhaustive, but we provide insight on 5 organizational patterns with a few embedded examples. In each example, only the three to five main sections or “points” (Roman numerals) are given, without the other essential parts of the outline. But don’t worry—we’ll cover outlines in the next chapter.

Chronological

A chronological organizational pattern groups information based on time order or in a set chronology—first this occurred, then this, then this, then that. The use of a chronological pattern is appropriate when the argument needs to be traced linearly or for speeches that instructor or demonstrate. For a speech about creating a meaningful and memorable protest poster, providing the instructions in order will allow audience members to actively deploy that information after the speech.

One of the problems with chronological speeches is the tendency to create a long list of activities rather than categorizing the content. It is important to chunk the information into three to five groups so that the audience has a framework. For example, in a speech about the history of the Civil Rights Movement, your “grouping” or “chunking” might be:

• The movement saw African-Americans struggling for legal recognition before the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
• The movement was galvanized and motivated by the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
• The movement saw major labor related goals met in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It would be easy in the case of the Civil Rights Movement to list the many events that happened over decades, but that could be overwhelming for the audience. In this grouping of events, the audience is focused on the three events that pushed it forward.

Spatial

You can see that chronological is a highly-used organizational structure, since one of the ways our minds work is through time-orientation—past, present, future. Another common thought process is movement in space or direction, which is called the spatial pattern. For example:

Specific Purpose: To explain to my classmates the three regional cooking styles of Italy.

• In the mountainous region of the North, the food emphasizes cheese and meat.
• In the middle region of Tuscany, the cuisine emphasizes grains and olives.
• In the southern region and Sicily, the diet is based on fish and sea-food.

In this example, the content is moving from northern to southern Italy, as the word “regional” would indicate. If you were to actually study Italian cooking in depth, sources will say there are twenty regions, but “covering” twenty regions in a speech is not practical, so research can help you limit and determine which regions would be more appropriate.

For a more localized application, consider this example:

Specific Purpose: To explain to my classmates the geographic layout of  memorials around the University of Maryland campus.

• The Frederick Douglass statue is located in front of Hornbake Library.
• The Jim Henson and Kermit Statue is located in the memorial garden in front of the Stamp Student Union.
• The 40-foot brick and concrete circle between Shoemaker and LeFrak halls memorializes the what used to be the center of campus before the Great Fire of 1912.

A spatial organizational pattern can assist audiences in visualizing your main points by grouping based on a spatial or geographic layout.

Topical/Categorical

The topical organizational pattern groups information into key categories. Many subjects will have main points that naturally divide into “types of,” “kinds of,” “sorts of,” or “categories of.” Other subjects naturally divide into “parts of the whole.” For example:

Specific purpose: To support the proposition that capital punishment should be abolished in the United States.

1.  Capital punishment does not save money for the justice system.
2.  Capital punishment does not deter crime in the United States historically.
3. Capital punishment has resulted in many unjust executions.

Another principle of organization to think about when using topical organization is “climax” organization. That means putting your strongest argument or most important point last when applicable. In the example above, “unjust executions” is a bigger reason to end a practice than the cost, since an unjust execution means the loss of an innocent life and a violation of our principles. If you believe Main Point III is the strongest argument of the three, putting it last builds up to a climax.

When using a topical pattern, you want to keep your categories simple, clear, and distinct by reducing repetition or blurriness between the groupings.

Cause/Effect Pattern

In a cause/effect pattern, the main points of a topic start with the cause, followed by the effect. If the specific purpose mentions words such as “causes,” “origins,” “roots of,” “foundations,” “basis,” “grounds,” or “source,” it is a causal order; if it mentions words such as “effects,” “results,” “outcomes,” “consequences,” or “products,” it is an effect order. If it mentions both, it would be cause/effect order. This example shows a cause/effect pattern:

Specific Purpose: To explain to my classmates the causes and effects of sleep deprivation during college .

1. The causes of sleep deprivation include stress, intensive schedule, and bad sleep habits.
2. The effects of sleep deprivation include a compromised immune system, lack of concentration, and mood changes.

This pattern can be helpful for an audience to understand how and/or why something has occurred. If your topic looks at a key problem, tracing how that problem originated may be worthwhile, even necessary, for an audience to track the outcomes.

Problem-Solution Pattern

The problem-solution pattern is closely related to cause/effect, but it also includes advocating for a key solution. This is a common organizational strategy used to persuade because a speaker is often asking the audience to address a problem with a concrete course of action. When you want to persuade someone to act, the first reason is usually that something is wrong!

We use a problem-solution pattern in everyday exchanges. If you and your friends were hungry (a problem), you’d invite them to dinner (the solution). However, if they’d recently eaten you might identify a secondary problem—you miss their company, for example.

Alternatively, let’s say that you want school board members to provide more funds for music at the three local high schools in your county. Ask yourself: What is missing because music or the arts are not funded? What is the problem? How is that a problem something that the school board should intervene to resolve? How does funding those programs resolve the problems that you’ve identified? For example:

Specific Purpose: To persuade the members of the school board to take action to support the music program at the school.

1. There is a problem with eliminating extracurricular music programs in high schools.
   

   

2. Students who do not have extracurricular music in their lives have lower SAT scores.
3. Schools that do not have extracurricular music programs have more instances of community violence.
4. The solution is to provide $200,000 in the budget to sustain extra-curricular music in our high schools.
   1. $120,000 would go to bands. This would be enough money to hire additional instructors and reserve after-school spaces.
   2. $80,000 would go to choral programs.

Of course, this is a simple outline and you would need to provide evidence to support the arguments, but it shows how problem-solution works. Psychologically, it makes more sense to use problem-solution rather than solution-problem. The audience will be more motivated to listen if you address needs, deficiencies, or problems in their lives rather than giving them solutions first.  Let’s turn now to thinking about the internal organization of your message.

Internal Organization

Now that you have developed a strong thesis (chapter 3) and organized your main points, you are ready to develop the introduction and conclusion and add transitions between points. You might wonder why this discussion comes now, after the previous sections on organization. Don’t speeches usually start with an introduction? Why not begin with that, then?

It’s hard to introduce something when you don’t yet know what you’re introducing. You need a working outline of your thesis and main points before you write your speech’s opening, or introduction, and closing, or conclusion. Therefore, we recommend writing these sections after you have a substantial amount of the main body constructed. Similarly, it’s difficult to write connective statements—connectors that move listeners from one point to the next—if you have not yet developed the main points!

In this section, we will begin by identifying the primary functions of introductions and conclusions. We will then turn to connective statements to help you communicate relationships between the sections of your speech.

Introductions and Conclusions

Introductions and conclusions serve to frame the speech and give it a clearly defined beginning and end. They help the audience to see what is to come in the speech, and then let them mentally prepare for the end. In doing this, introductions and conclusions provide a “preview/review” of your speech as a means to reiterate to your audience what you are talking about. Because speeches are auditory and live, you need to make sure that audiences remember what you are saying.

The general rule is that the introduction and conclusion should each be about 10% of your total speech, leaving 80% for the body section. It can be tempting to have longer introductions, but that often leaves less time to introduce key research and warrant your ideas through the main points.