Preparation part 1: selecting the topic and understanding your audience

1. Choosing the Topic

When it comes to topic selection, sometimes you do not have much choice, as it is simply assigned to you by others.  You may need to adjust it to fit the time allotted for your speech, but that is all that you will need to consider. For example, your boss wants you to present your department’s latest sales figures and you have ten minutes during the next board meeting to do so. In such a situation, you will need to make sure that you include the most important data and your presentation does not exceed ten minutes.

Sometimes, however, you may choose or formulate the subject of your presentation yourself. When you do, start with an idea. What is it that you really want to talk about? Consider the questions:

  1. Do you find the topic interesting?
  2. Will it be interesting for your audience?
  3. Will you be adding to their knowledge or is the subject totally unknown to them? What do they already know about the topic? Do you know more about the topic than the audience does?
  4. Can you narrow the topic down to make it more interesting?
  5. For example, talking about a specific tourist attraction in your home town may be more interesting than presenting several of them in a general way.

It is good to set a limit for yourself and decide to have only one main idea in the speech. Chris Anderson, the curator for TED Talks, says that before you start preparing your speech you need to decide what your “throughline” is (Anderson, 2017). What is the main idea that you are going to present and develop in your speech? (We will discuss developing your main idea in terms of purpose in Unit 4).

As you have seen so far, choosing the subject of your speech is inherently connected to an analysis of your audience. The “best” topic (in your view and based on your interests) may not be interesting to your audience at all!