A great speaker can make almost anything interesting. Almost. You can have perfect delivery, strong evidence, and jokes that actually land, but if your topic is “The History of Pencils From 1564 to Today,” you may be fighting an uphill battle. Choosing a topic isn’t just about finding something you can talk about. It’s about finding something that gives you enough room to say something worth hearing. The best topics usually sit in a sweet spot: specific enough to explore deeply, but broad...

Before you start writing a speech, there’s one surprisingly important question to answer: What exactly am I trying to make my audience do? Learn something? Change their mind? Feel something? Understanding speech types is like having a GPS for your content. Each type serves a different purpose and follows a unique structure. Different speeches ask different things from an audience, which means they need different structures. 1. Informative Speeches: The Teacher's Approach Purpose: Teach your...

More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle gave the questions "does this make sense? do I trust you? why should I care?" names: logos, ethos, and pathos. And despite being older than PowerPoint by a few millennia, they’re still pretty useful. Logos: The Logic Appeal So what is logos? Simply put, it's evidence, statistics, logical reasoning. Saying something like 4 billion people like soccer is an example. But when should you use logos? When your audience values facts and data. If you just tell me...