Why is it important to support your ideas in a speech why is it necessary to back up your statements in a speech?

Communication is the backbone of our society. It allows us to form connections, influence decisions, and motivate change. Without communication skills, the ability to progress in the working world and in life, itself, would be nearly impossible.

Public speaking is one of the most important and most dreaded forms of communication. Glossophobia or speech anxiety, is the most common fear people have across the globe. Throughout primary school, it is easy to be the student who sits in the back of the classroom and avoids raising his or her hand to dodge such situations. But in the working world, public speaking is a vital skill to have and to hone. It effects simple, everyday interactions between coworkers, bosses and employees, marketing professionals and clients, etc., and it can have an enormous impact on your career path and your level of success in your industry.

There are many reasons why public speaking is important but the 3 that we believe to be the most significant are:

1. To Win Over the Crowd

An important skill to have in business and especially in the public relations arena is the skill of persuasion or the ability to win over the crowd. Inside and outside the workplace, the power of persuasion can carry you far and it all starts by honing those public speaking skills. Mastering public speaking results in an increase in confidence and with that, a cool and collected presence in front of an audience. Of course it is imperative to be knowledgeable about the subject you are presenting, but beyond that, when making a persuasive speech of any kind, including a sales pitch to a client, you need to be prepared to answer the opposition, and to speak with poise.

To make a strong case, the ability to speak publicly is not only important, but essential to make forward strides. For example, in order to express why a certain product or idea would be an interesting topic to an editor of a publication, one must use strong enough, convincing language to elicit intrigue and curiosity. A great pitch will persuade the consumer or editor to want to know more. When addressing any audience with an idea or argument for or against something, public speaking allows you to make your case compellingly and convincingly.

For tips on how to pitch the media, read “Pitching Do’s & Don’ts with PR Pros“

2. To Motivate People

A great public speaker attains the power to motivate his or her audience to do something, stop doing something, change a behavior, or reach objectives. But to carry an idea forward, you must be able to excite and enliven your peers, employees, coworkers, customers.

Public speakers are leaders who are able to inspire their audience to work harder to achieve their goals. As a public speaker, your role is to influence your listeners and create an environment where everyone walks out ready to roll. You are not merely giving a speech in the attempt to get your audience to take a certain action; speakers are part of the action and can convey their passion and drive. It is not enough to simply know about the issues at hand but to make your audience share your passion. Elections have been won simply because one candidate was a better public speaker than the other. Being knowledgeable is a factor, of course, but more importantly, being able to arouse passion in people through skilled public speaking will motivate your audience to make a move.  When people talk about having a voice in the world, they mean having an impact on the world by voicing your thoughts and your knowledge in an exciting way. A mastery of public speaking allows you to relate to the audience and gain their trust. As a skilled public speaker, you become likable and believable, and you will be able to inspire and even entertain the crowd.

3. To Inform

The ability to inform is one of the most important aspects of public speaking.  From presenting research papers and PowerPoint presentations in school to presenting ideas and pitches to your boss or client, informative public speaking is a vital component of a successful career across all work fields. Once you have their attention, a good informative speech sharing your knowledge of a subject with an audience, enhances their understanding and makes them remember your words long after you’ve finished. For example, you might be asked to instruct a group of coworkers on how to use new computer software or to address your employees on company happenings. Whether it is giving demonstrations or sharing an area of expertise, this form of public speaking is an essential skill in today’s world.

According to a study by sociologist, Andrew Zekeri, “Oral communication skills were the number one skill that college graduates found useful in the business world.” Communication skills enhance your ability to interact with professionals and fellow colleagues in a qualified and composed manner. Public speaking improves these skills and thus, makes you a more worthy candidate to move up and succeed in your chosen field.

Perfect the rest of your thought leadership strategy with this guide.

A speech is about making a claim and providing evidence to support your claim. Evidence used should support your claim/thesis and be concise and clear. 

Types of evidence

Evidence for your thesis or claim can vary depending on the topic and the type of speech you’re writing.

Statistics might seem like the most credible, but these can be very boring, hard to understand and inappropriate.

Use different kinds of support for each point:

• Definitions: Define terms the audience may not be familiar with: Explaining PB&J represents peanut butter and jelly sandwiches will help the audience follow as you are speaking.
• Examples: Give examples of how your argument/thesis is valid: An examples could be a visual, remove a PB&J from a sandwich bag to show that when made with peanut butter on both sides there is no mess.
• Personal testimony: Audiences often relate to personal stories: I personally love PB&J sandwiches and was so happy when I found this method of making them. I really like keeping may hands and clothes stain free.

Different kinds of evidence will have different effects—emotion, interest of the audience or objectivity.

• The little boy was crying because his hands were sticky from the jelly of his sandwich evokes a different response than listing the results from a survey.
• Both statements support the claim that peanut butter on both sides of the bread is the better option; however, each will be received and processed differently by the audience.

Take only the evidence you need from sources

As you read a source, you will notice many pieces of evidence are contained in one paragraph. As the speaker, you need to determine the pieces that support your claim or thesis.

Use only the evidence that you need to support the argument/thesis.

• Determine exactly what the audience needs to know
  • According to the Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich survey of 1997 done by the Elementary School District, kids prefer not to have jelly leak through the bread.
  • The unnecessary information not included: 519 kids preferred grape jelly and 600 preferred strawberry jelly. 1100 of the students do not like having jelly leak through the bread while 19 like having sticky fingers.
• Determine why the audience needs the information
• Using a speech outline (see resource on speech outlining) will help you narrow down the necessary information.

Making evidence relatable to the audience

Explanation of sources may be necessary to show the evidence's significance to the argument/thesis.

Complex information and definitions need to be presented in a way the audiences will understand. Visuals for more complex info (especially for statistics) may be helpful.

References

Beebe, S. A., & Beebe, S. J. (2012). A concise public speaking handbook. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Lucas, S. (2012). The art of public speaking. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Sprague, J. & Stuart, D. (2013). The speaker's compact handbook, 4th ed. Portland: Ringgold, Inc.

Vrooman, S. S. (2013). The zombie guide to public speaking: Why most presentations fail, and what you can do to avoid joining the horde. Place of publication not identified: CreateSpace.

Speakers use support to help provide a foundation for their message. You can think of support as the legs on a table. Without the legs, the table becomes a slab of wood or glass lying on the ground; as such, it cannot fully serve the purpose of a table. In the same way, without support, a speech is nothing more than fluff. Audience members may ignore the speech’s message, dismissing it as just so much hot air. In addition to being the foundation that a speech stands on, support also helps us clarify content, increase speaker credibility, and make the speech more vivid.

The first reason to use support in a speech is to clarify content. Speakers often choose a piece of support because a previous writer or speaker has phrased something in a way that evokes a clear mental picture of the point they want to make. For example, suppose you’re preparing a speech about hazing in college fraternities. You may read your school’s code of student conduct to find out how your campus defines hazing. You could use this definition to make sure your audience understands what hazing is and what types of behaviors your campus identifies as hazing.

Another important reason to use support is because it adds to your credibility as a speaker. The less an audience perceives you as an expert on a given topic, the more important it is to use a range of support. By doing so, you let your audience know that you’ve done your homework on the topic.

At the same time, you could hurt your credibility if you use inadequate support or support from questionable sources. Your credibility will also suffer if you distort the intent of a source to try to force it to support a point that the previous author did not address. For example, the famous 1798 publication by Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, has been used as support for various arguments far beyond what Malthus could have intended. Malthus’s thesis was that as the human population increases at a greater rate than food production, societies will go to war over scarce food resources. Some modern writers have suggested that, according to the Malthusian line of thinking, almost anything that leads to a food shortage could lead to nuclear war. For example, better health care leads to longer life spans, which leads to an increased need for food, leading to food shortages, which lead to nuclear war. Clearly, this argument makes some giant leaps of logic that would be hard for an audience to accept.

For this reason, it is important to evaluate your support to ensure that it will not detract from your credibility as a speaker. Here are four characteristics to evaluate when looking at support options: accuracy, authority, currency, and objectivity.

One of the quickest ways to lose credibility in the eyes of your audience is to use support that is inaccurate or even questionably accurate. Admittedly, determining the accuracy of support can be difficult if you are not an expert in a given area, but here are some questions to ask yourself to help assess a source’s accuracy:

• Does the information within one piece of supporting evidence completely contradict other supporting evidence you’ve seen?
• If the support is using a statistic, does the supporting evidence explain where that statistic came from and how it was determined?
• Does the logic behind the support make sense?

One of this book’s authors recently observed a speech in which a student said, “The amount of pollution produced by using paper towels instead of hand dryers is equivalent to driving a car from the east coast to St. Louis.” The other students in the class, as well as the instructor, recognized that this information sounded wrong and asked questions about the information source, the amount of time it would take to produce this much pollution, and the number of hand dryers used. The audience demonstrated strong listening skills by questioning the information, but the speaker lost credibility by being unable to answer their questions.

The second way to use support in building your credibility is to cite authoritative sources—those who are experts on the topic. In today’s world, there are all kinds of people who call themselves “experts” on a range of topics. There are even books that tell you how to get people to regard you as an expert in a given industry. Today there are “experts” on every street corner or website spouting off information that some listeners will view as legitimate.

So what truly makes someone an expert? Bruce D. Weinstein, a professor at West Virginia University’s Center for Health Ethics and Law, defined expertiseKnowledge in or about a particular field or domains of demonstrable skills. as having two senses. In his definition, the first sense of expertise is “knowledge in or about a particular field, and statements about it generally take the form, ‘S is an expert in or about D.’… The second sense of expertise refers to domains of demonstrable skills, and statements about it generally take the form, ‘S is an expert at skill D.’” Thus, to be an expert, someone needs to have considerable knowledge on a topic or considerable skill in accomplishing something.

As a novice researcher, how can you determine whether an individual is truly an expert? Unfortunately, there is no clear-cut way to wade through the masses of “experts” and determine each one’s legitimacy quickly. However, Table 8.1 "Who Is an Expert?" presents a list of questions based on the research of Marie-Line Germain that you can ask yourself to help determine whether someone is an expert.

Table 8.1 Who Is an Expert?

You don’t have to answer “yes” to all the preceding questions to conclude that a source is credible, but a string of “no” answers should be a warning signal. In a Columbia Journalism Review article, Allisa Quart raised the question of expert credibility regarding the sensitive subject of autism. Specifically, Quart questioned whether the celebrity spokesperson and autism advocate Jennifer McCarthy (http://www.generationrescue.org/) qualifies as an expert. Quart notes that McCarthy “insists that vaccines caused her son’s neurological disorder, a claim that has near-zero support in scientific literature.” Providing an opposing view is a widely read blog called Respectful Insolence (http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/), whose author is allegedly a surgeon/scientist who often speaks out about autism and “antivaccination lunacy.” Respectful Insolence received the 2008 Best Weblog Award from MedGagdet: The Internet Journal of Emerging Medical Technologies. We used the word “allegedly” when referring to the author of Respectful Insolence because as the website explains that the author’s name, Orac, is the “nom de blog of a (not so) humble pseudonymous surgeon/scientist with an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent’s posterior about his miscellaneous verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few will.”

When comparing the celebrity Jenny McCarthy to the blogger Orac, who do you think is the better expert? Were you able to answer “yes” to the questions in Table 8.1 "Who Is an Expert?" for both “experts”? If not, why not? Overall, determining the authority of support is clearly a complicated task, and one that you should spend time thinking about as you prepare the support for your speech.

The third consideration in using support to build your credibility is how current the information is. Some ideas stay fairly consistent over time, like the date of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor or the mathematical formula for finding the area of a circle, but other ideas change wildly in a short period of time, including ideas about technology, health treatments, and laws.

Although we never want to discount classic supporting information that has withstood the test of time, as a general rule for most topics, we recommend that information be less than five years old. Obviously, this is just a general guideline and can change depending on the topic. If you’re giving a speech on the history of mining in West Virginia, then you may use support from sources that are much older. However, if you’re discussing a medical topic, then your support information should probably be from the past five years or less. Some industries change even faster, so the best support may come from the past month. For example, if are speaking about advances in word processing, using information about Microsoft Word from 2003 would be woefully out-of-date because two upgrades have been released since 2003 (2007 and 2010). As a credible speaker, it is your responsibility to give your audience up-to-date information.

The last question you should ask yourself when examining support is whether the person or organization behind the information is objective or biased. BiasA predisposition or preconception of a topic that prevents impartiality. refers to a predisposition or preconception of a topic that prevents impartiality. Although there is a certain logic to the view that every one of us is innately biased, as a credible speaker, you want to avoid just passing along someone’s unfounded bias in your speech. Ideally you would use support that is unbiased; Table 8.2 "Is a Potential Source of Support Biased?" provides some questions to ask yourself when evaluating a potential piece of support to detect bias.

Table 8.2 Is a Potential Source of Support Biased?

As with the questions in Table 8.1 "Who Is an Expert?" about expertise, you don’t have to have all “no” or “yes” responses to decide on bias. However, being aware of the possibility of bias and where your audience might see bias will help you to select the best possible support to include in your speech.

In addition to clarifying content and enhancing credibility, support helps make a speech more vivid. VividnessA speaker’s ability to present information in a striking, exciting manner. refers to a speaker’s ability to present information in a striking, exciting manner. The goal of vividness is to make your speech more memorable. One of the authors still remembers a vivid example from a student speech given several years ago. The student was speaking about the importance of wearing seat belts and stated that the impact from hitting a windshield at just twenty miles per hour without a seat belt would be equivalent to falling out of the window of their second-floor classroom and landing face-first on the pavement below. Because they were in that classroom several times each week, students were easily able to visualize the speaker’s analogy and it was successful at creating an image that is remembered years later. Support helps make your speech more interesting and memorable to an audience member.

Key Takeaways

• The strategies a public speaker can use to provide corroborating evidence for the speech’s central idea and specific purpose are called support.
• There are three primary reasons to use support: to clarify content, to increase speaker credibility, and to make the speech more vivid.
• A good piece of support should be accurate, authoritative, current, and unbiased.

Exercises

1. Find an article online about a topic on which you are interested in speaking. Examine it for the four aspects of effective sources (e.g., accuracy, authority, currency, and objectivity). Do you think this source is credible? Why?
2. Find a speech on the Vital Speeches of the Day website (http://www.vsotd.com) and try to identify the types of support the speaker utilized. Is the speaker’s use of support effective? Why or why not?