Crafting Strong Arguments

Key Takeaways

• Systematically think through the support you have accumulated through your research. Examine the accumulated support to ensure that a variety of forms of support are used. Choose appropriate forms of support depending on the speech context or audience. Make sure all the support is relevant to the specific purpose of your speech and to your audience. Don't go overboard using so much support that the audience is overwhelmed. Lastly, don't manipulate supporting materials.
• Speakers ultimately turn support materials into one of five formats. Quotations are used to take another speaker or author's ideas and relay them verbatim. Paraphrases take a small portion of a source and use one's own words to simplify and clarify the central idea. Summaries are used to condense an entire source into a short explanation of the source's central idea. Numerical support is used to quantify information from a source. Pictographic support helps audience members both see and hear the idea being expressed by a source.
• Use a reverse outline to ensure that all the main ideas are thoroughly supported. Start with the basic conclusion and then work backward to ensure that the argument is supported at every point of the speech.
• Every claim within a speech should be supported. While some experts can get away with not supporting every claim, nonexperts must show they have done their homework.
• To present support in a speech, use a three-step process: setup, execution, and analysis. The setup explains who the speaker or author is and provides the name of the source and other relevant bibliographic information to the audience. The execution is the actual delivery of the support. Lastly, a speaker needs to provide analysis explain