Chapter 9 – Selecting and Arranging Main Ideas for Your Speech

By: Anthony Browne and Chance Wilson

Selecting and Arranging Main Ideas

9.1 - Importance of Organization

9.2 - Selecting the Main Ideas of Your Speech

9.3 - Arranging the Main Ideas of Your Speech

9.4 - Selecting and Arranging the Supporting Ideas of Your Speech

9.1 Why Organization is Important• Organization – Selection of ideas and materials and their

arrangement into a discernible and effective pattern.• Not only will organization help your audience remember

your speech better, but it will also engage them more and even allow them to anticipate what’s next, giving them satisfaction.

• It will also help you as the speaker be able to check if something is missing in your speech if, for example, you were talking about volcanoes and you only mentioned active and dormant, but left out extinct.

• Selecting and arranging will be the two main ideas of our speech today

9.2 Selecting the Main Ideas of Your Speech

• Main ideas are the claim that address the issues in your thesis statement and they are the major divisions of the speech.

• Your thesis statement is usually a sentence that tells your audience what the contents of your speech will be in the most concise but clear way possible, we will go over this later.

• These main ideas can also come from patterns in your research.

• The choices you make will be affected by your audience’s acceptance, denial, or dispute and by the relevance it has to the topic.

Main Ideas From Your Thesis Statement

• Say you want to talk about why people should buy the Slap Chop. You would get your main ideas from that exact question, “Why should people buy the Slap Chop?”

1. Why do they need Slap Chop?2. What does buying Slap Chop do for them?3. What is a Slap Chop?• Thesis statement – The Slap Chop is a food slicer that is easy to

use and can make meals in seconds.• Since you don’t want to confuse your audience, explaining

what the Slap Chop is first is a good idea so that they can understand what it is and then you can tell them its benefits. Be sure to have your main ideas in an understandable order.

Main Ideas From Your Research

• You can also get main ideas from the information you find while researching.

• If you were to find online that half of the funds raised by the Slap Chop go to charity, then that would be a good point to bring up to persuade your audience.

How to Come Up With Main Ideas• Asking these questions about your topic will allow you to more easily think of

main ideas.A. What does it mean?B. How to describe it?C. What are the facts?D. What are the reasons?E. How often does it occur?F. What are the parts?G. What is the reasoning?H. Why is it strange?I. What are the objections?J. Compared with what?• Obviously, you can come up with topics without these, but they’re here to help

you if you can’t think of any.

Speech Length

• On most topics, you will have an abundance of ideas to choose from and while they might all be interesting and support your speech well, the speech itself must be a decent length or else you will lose your audience.

• Speeches generally contain two to five main ideas. If you’re over five, then you probably want to ask yourself, “Is this idea essential to my speech?” and “Can I combine a few of these into one idea?”

Examples for Deleting and Combining Ideas

• Deleting – You might find out that the Slap Chop guy, Vince Offer, punched a prostitute which, while very interesting, does not help you persuade your audience.

• Make sure you stay on topic with what you’re trying to say and not go off on tangents.

• Combining – This would be if you were to find out that the materials in the Slap Chop are all 100% American made. Although it’s nice to know that it’s high quality, combining that information with your other main idea of what a Slap Chop is would be better.

• Try to combine ideas that answer the same questions, those two answered, “How to describe it?”

Fine-tuning Your Main Ideas

• After you have put some of your main ideas on the Slap Chopping block, you’ll still need to make sure they’re simple, discrete, structured similarly to each other, balanced, coherent, and complete.

Simplicity

• The key to helping the audience recall information.

• Being succinct, or keeping your words brief but information, is a good way to key your audience’s attention.

• “Slap Chop slices food easily,” is better than, “Slap Chop can be used to chop vegetables for salads and other foods easily.”

• Try to keep your main idea short and concise.

Discreteness

• Having your topics be distinguishable from each other is very important.

• When your ideas overlap, the audience can become confused.

• If you were to talk about the Slap Chop’s easy to use and then go on about how it’s easy to clean, then the topics can become indistinguishable and confusing.

• Be sure to combine similar topics like we talked about earlier so that you don’t run into this problem.

Parallel Structuring

• If possible, structure your main ideas similar to each other.

• Make sure they are similar in grammar and length.1. Slap Chop is effective.2. Slap Chop is efficient.3. Slap Chop is cheap.• When you do this, the audience knows exactly

what they need to listen for without any confusion.

Balance

• Balance in the amount of information talked about in each topic is necessary to educate the audience fully about your topic.

• Say you talk about the price, the free Graty, and the customer praise, and then end off with what the Slap Chop actually is.

• If you were to do this, your audience would not only be confused, but also poorly educated about the Slap Chop.

• You want to spread out the necessary information between your two to five main ideas and leave out unimportant information.

Coherence

• Coherence is when your main ideas have clear relationships between one another.

• If you were to talk about the price of the Slap Chop, then the country of its origin, and then how Vince punched a prostitute, there’s no coherence between these topics.

• The audience will have trouble understanding what you’re trying to convey to them.

• When you talk about what the Slap Chop is, this will lead to how it works, which will lead to how this is beneficial to you.

• Note how the relationships between each topic are clear and lead into each other. We’ll go into how this is a good way of arranging main ideas soon.

Completeness

• Finally, make sure you’ve covered every important aspect of your topic.

• If you were to leave out how the Slap Chop works, your audience wouldn’t have the full picture.

• If the audience doesn’t know or understand the main point of the topic, they might become confused and not understand the entire speech.

9.3 Arranging Main Ideas

• To start off with, some main ideas depend on others before them to be more effective.

• These types of ideas are called logically dependent ideas.

• There are also ideas that do not depend on the other ideas to get their idea to the audience.

• These types of ideas are called logically independent ideas.

Arranging Main Ideas for Your Audience

• When you begin your speech, you will want to start with what your audience is familiar with and relate it to your next topics.

• Suppose you talk about volcanoes and explain the three types of volcanoes, which most people know, and then you talk about super volcanoes, which people might not know about, and then tell them one resides in Yellowstone National Park.

• If you were to begin with something unfamiliar, then you would probably lose your audience and they will have trouble understanding the rest of your speech.

• Asking a question such as, “Have you ever thought about there being another kind of volcano?” would help you transition from the familiar to the unfamiliar.

Logically Dependent Ideas

• These ideas form a chain from one idea to the next, strengthening the message you’re trying to get across.

1. If we don’t cure cancer, people will die.2. If people die, they won’t be able to care for corgis.3. If corgis aren’t cared for, they will die out.4. If corgis die out, the world will have no reason to exist.• As you can see, the topic after the first depends on each one

before it.• The audience should be able to follow the different main

ideas of your chain easily, so make sure they’re both discrete and coherent.

Dangers and Advantages of Logically Dependent Ideas

• Be wary when using a dependent chain because any flaws in your argument will cause your whole speech to break.

• At the same time, if you use it correctly, it can become stronger than a speech that uses independent ideas because everything is so bound together.

• The chain can also be more easily followed by the audience because of this connection.

Logically Independent Ideas

• These kinds of ideas can stand alone and not have to depend on any of the other topics.

1. Trees come in many varieties.2. Trees grow throughout the year from the sun.3. Trees are chopped down to create things.• These are all from the same topic, but the ideas

are independent of each other and don’t rely on one another for more impact or understanding.

Problems with Logically Independent Ideas

• When using main ideas that are independent and unequal in strength, you have to ask when to use the strongest one.

• A strong idea is an idea that will grab the audience’s attention.

• An idea that is very well supported that doesn’t interest the audience is weak.

When to Use Your Strongest Idea

• Should you use your strongest argument first or last?• The primacy effect(strongest first) versus the recency

effect(strongest last) haven’t found results leading towards either being better, so you can choose whichever you like more.

• Weaker arguments should be used in the middle though, rather than the beginning or end.

• The strength of your arguments depends on your audience, so try to know and understand your audience when making your speech.

Organizational Patterns

• After you’ve figured those things out for your speech, arranging your ideas into specific patterns will make them easier to understand.

• The patterns can stem from your topic, the ideas in the topic, your audience, or from your own ideas.

• We’ll first discuss how you can arrange it into a chronological, spatial, categorical, cause-effect, problem-solution, comparison and contrast, or residues pattern.

Chronological

• When the passage of time is involved, putting your ideas in chronological order is a good choice, an example of this could be:

1. Chariot usage in 3000 BCE2. Medieval carriage usage in 1500s3. Coach carriage usage in 1800s4. Car usage in 2000s• This shows a timeline of transportation used throughout

history.• Going backwards is also acceptable, so you can possibly start

with something familiar and then move to the unfamiliar.

Spatial

• Spatial refers to ideas that may be different in position or place.• You order them by how large the topic is compared to each

other and zoom in or zoom out based on your research:1. Pembroke welsh corgis are adorable.2. Dogs are adorable.3. Animals are adorable.• Another way that’s similar is ordering them by their physical

location:1. Corgi behavior on the East coast.2. Corgi behavior on the West coast.3. Corgi behavior in Asia.

Categorical or Topical

• These are the ideas that are related to the main topic, but are otherwise separate.

• Think of them as logically independent ideas.1. PB & J sandwiches are tasty.2. PB & J sandwiches are filling.3. PB & J sandwiches are cheap.• Three topics that can stand on their own, but together

form the whole.• Basically, you choose these topics based off of your

research and what you think is important.

Cause - Effect

• These are main ideas that cause the next idea in the speech.1. Reading allows you to expand your vocabulary.2. An expanded vocabulary allows you to write better.3. Writing better improves your grades and résumés.• You can also reverse this pattern by telling the effect first and

then what caused it.1. I have exceptional writing skills.2. This was caused by my large vocabulary.3. My large vocabulary was caused by reading a lot.• Choosing between the two should depend on the strength of

your topics and whether you want to begin or end strongly, as detailed earlier.

Problem - Solution• Similar to cause-effect, problem-solution presents a problem and then a

solution to it.1. Corgis will die if not taken care of.2. As such, people will mourn the loss of doggies.3. To prevent this, feed and take care of your corgi.• You want to establish the problem, tell why it’s bad, and then provide a

solution.• You can also incorporate your audience into the speech.1. We all love dogs and what they provide us.2. The love we share is stronger than with any other animal.3. As such, care for and feed your dogs.• You make the audience understand what you want to persuade them to do

by including them into the speech like this.

Comparison and Contrast

• Comparing or contrasting can be very useful for introducing an unfamiliar concept with a familiar one so the audience can understand more easily.

1. Dogs are smart.2. Smart people work on spaceships.3. Countries have sent dogs into space.4. Sending animals into space is inhumane.• After you come up with your main ideas, your last idea should

either highlight the similarities or differences between them.1. Chibblus2. Squibblo

Residues

• The last technique should be used when there are a limited number of choices for ideas and none of them are particularly good.

• You would choose the idea that’s the best of the bad and explain how it’s better than the rest.

1. George W. Bush might be bad, but here are the good.2. Nixon was bad, here’s why.3. Hoover was bad, here’s why.• Obviously, this one should be used as a last resort.

When to Use These Patterns

• All of these organizational patterns are useful for specific purposes, but how do you know when to use them?

• This can depend on your topic, its purpose, your audience, or your culture.

Subject

• Your subject can determine it if it were about a historical event which would benefit from being told chronologically.

• Talking about different parts of a computer could be explained using cause-effect by explaining how one part causes all the other parts to work.

Purpose

• Your purpose can affect your arrangement if you want to make the audience understand a problem and then provide them with your solution to it.

• You could also show the differences and similarities of your topic to give praise to something and convert the audience or show them the bad side of a topic.

Audience

• Who your audience is can affect how much detail you give to certain topics.

• Say I want to talk about the iPhone, I don’t have to go into much detail since we all mostly know what it is and what it does, so I could move onto my purpose.

• If I were to talk to a group of people who have never heard of one, I’d go into great detail about how it works and then explain my purpose to them.

Culture

• The culture of the audience can be very important as well.

• If you give a speech to a group of Christians, you would want to make sure not to insult their religion and possibly compare your speech to their teachings.

• Compare and contrast would be useful in that case.• Other examples of cultures could be Chinese,

Americans, teenagers, teachers, etc., so be sure to understand their culture so your speech is more suited for your audience.

9.4 Supporting Ideas

• Main ideas use supporting ideas that are called subheadings.

• They are arranged in a similar fashion to the main ideas.

• Like main ideas, there’s a way of going about selecting and arranging your subheadings, so we’ll be going over how much, what kind, and what criteria for selection and then how to arrange them all.

How Much?

• When putting together your support material, how much is too much or too little?

• You need enough to have a strong case, but not too much that it’s long and repetitive.

• Determining how much detail you go into depends on the audience’s acceptance of your claim.

• If you start with, “Puppies should be given out for free at Three Rivers,” then you’ve already won the audience’s attention as opposed to saying, “Dogs shouldn’t be allowed as pets,” where you would need large amounts of material to win them over.

• Although, your audience could all hate dogs and the reverse could happen, so try to understand your audience beforehand so something like this doesn’t happen.

How Much? Continued

• Basically, the more knowledge your audience has, the less supporting material you will need.

• Don’t stereotype your audience or assume that everyone is the exact same though.

• Make sure your points aren’t redundant and give new information.

What Kind?

• Use different kinds of supporting materials like statistics, examples, documents, quotes, facts, visuals, etc. so that the viewer isn’t bored with the same material.

• When you do this, stick to a pattern so the audience can anticipate what’s next.

• Your audience also determines your subheadings.• If you have supporters and opposition, then having

support directed at both parties will help get both groups on your side.

What Criteria?• How do you decide which supporting evidence to use?1. Use the evidence with the most credibility.2. Select evidence that is the easiest to understand.

A. In the case of numbers like 1,234,567, try to truncate it down to 1 million or 1.2 million. With 0.01, say one-hundredth.

3. Select the most interesting material and consider the audience.4. Have your evidence match your own logic or beliefs so that you can

defend it more easily.5. Make sure that your material is good to present, like using a chart

to explain statistics rather than a lengthy explanation.6. Select evidence that can be cited easily. You can’t cite out the

entire bibliography out loud, but make sure you can cite a source easily with an understandable name.

Arranging Your Supporting Ideas

• Arranging your supporting ideas is also important, similar to your main ideas.

• Suppose you want to show the amount of corgis adopted across several years to show their appeal before explaining why people love them.

• This will give evidence to what you’re talking about and the audience will be able to agree with your argument easier.

Review

• Organizing your main ideas not only helps your audience understand and agree with your topic easier, but it also engages them and helps them remember what you talked about.

• Be sure to consider your audience so that your information can be understood easily and so they accept it.

• Remember to be concise and to either remove or combine similar topics so that your speech isn’t cluttered.

• Your supporting ideas are just as important as your main ideas and work the same way, so organize them just as well as your main ideas.

Did You Get All That, Camera Guy?

We hope you enjoyed our presentation!