 So you walk into your favorite class one day, which is obviously public speaking, right? And you find out we're going to get a new assignment today. We have a speech assignment coming up. And so the friendly instructor that you have says, okay, I'm going to assign topics to people. Here's what you're going to speak about. She looks at you and says, you're going to give a speech about the tanks of World War II. So find out about those tanks, give us a speech about them, and form us about them, and do the speech assignment over the tanks of World War II. And you may be sitting there thinking, what? I don't know anything about the tanks of World War II. I don't care about the tanks of World War II. Why would this cruel person assign this topic to me? And how am I supposed to go about this? But let's flip that around a little bit. Let's say you have a kind and compassionate faculty member, right? Who says you can talk about anything you want. You pick your own topic. It doesn't matter as long as it fits in with this, you know, if it's an informative topic or a persuasive topic or whatever, as long as it fits in that category, talk about whatever you like. And you're thinking, what a cool guy, right? He must be awesome. This must be the best faculty member in history. He just lets us pick whatever we want. Let's, you know, go about it in our own way. And how kind is that? And then you start thinking, okay, what should I talk about? And you realize, okay, the possibilities are endless here. I literally have the entire world and in fact, the entire history of the world or potential futures of this world to draw from, to pick a topic from. How am I supposed to do that? How am I supposed to pick a topic out of the entire world of possibilities and the entire existence of human history and so forth? You may start sweating about having too many options, right? You may start thinking, man, this is really the torture. How much would have preferred just somebody assigning me the tanks of World War II as a speech topic rather than have to go through all this pain and agony of trying to decide myself, right? Well, the truth is, topic selection and public speaking doesn't have to be all that complicated. There's a process that you can follow and some questions that you can ask yourself that will help you narrow down your topic so that you can find something that's appropriate for the assignment, appropriate for you as a speaker, appropriate for your audience, and consider all of those things. So let's take a look at how we do that in identifying topic selection for speech. First, I'm going to suggest that there are three questions you should be asking yourself as you think about topic selection as you're working to narrow this down. The first is, are you passionate about this topic? I'm sure you can all identify times when you've heard a speaker and they just clearly were not interested in that topic. Wasn't an area of passion for them. Wasn't really an area of interest for them. And so you could just tell they didn't have that energy, that enthusiasm for the topic. And if the speaker doesn't have that, then it's really hard for the audience to find that energy and enthusiasm about the topic, right? And so then you get to what's the point? If I don't care about it and the audience doesn't care about it, then why am I even giving this speech, right? Apart from if you're in a class giving it for a grade. We want to identify whenever possible when you have the opportunity to do so, a topic that you're passionate about. So start by thinking about what is it that I'm interested in? What do I like to do? What do I care about? What am I passionate about? And start with your topic selection in that area so that you're making sure you're more likely than to have the appropriate energy and enthusiasm when you're speaking about that topic. The next question we want to ask ourselves is are you knowledgeable about this topic? Am I? Do I know anything about this topic? And you don't have to be an expert on every topic you choose to give a speech on. But the point is, first of all, do I have some existing knowledge? Do I know anything about this topic? That's always helpful for a head start, right? But having knowledge about that topic can also give you a head start in things like knowing where to go to find more information. So maybe I don't know everything about this topic right now, but I have an idea of where I could go to get some more information about this topic. And so I'm starting from a pretty good foundation of knowledge when it comes to identifying a topic. So as far as you, the speaker, are concerned, we want to ask ourselves, am I passionate about this topic? And am I knowledgeable about this topic? Start where those things come together. But then there's a really, really important third question that doesn't have as much to do with you, but is really crucial to the effectiveness and the success of your speech. And that is, is the topic relevant to your audience? Again, there's no point in giving a speech if nobody's going to care about it, nobody's going to listen, and people don't think it has any impact on their life. So we need to start thinking about, okay, am I passionate about this? Yes, do I know about this? Yes. Is this something that the audience is going to care about? And even if the answer is not an obvious yes, if you're thinking to yourself, no, they really probably don't know or care about this topic, it doesn't mean you have to put that topic away altogether. But you may have to ask yourself then, okay, are there some ways that I could get the audience interested in this topic? Are there some ways that I could demonstrate relevance to the audience to help them be interested in this topic? And if you can find some of those things, then yeah, you can establish some relevance there, and go ahead with that topic. But if the answer is no, they don't know about it or care about it, and they, I can't think of any way to help them care about it. There's no reason that they would care about it. It's something that's really specifically for me, and then that may not be a great topic. What you really want to find is something from, you know, the convergence of those three things, something you care about, something you have a little bit of knowledge about at least, and something that's going to be relevant for the audience. So that's where we want to start. Start by where those things intersect, where those three questions intersect in identifying some topics. A couple more questions to ask yourself about, is it a good topic? And once you're, you know, getting into some specifics about, is this a good topic? First, ask yourself, is this unique or new information or perspective for the audience? Is this something that's going to be new information for them? If you're giving a speech on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, that's not really probably going to be of much interest and not useful, not new information for the audience. So we may need to keep looking beyond things like that. So we want to find something that's going to be unique and have new information or new perspective for that audience. You also want to ask yourself, is it relevant or useful? Again, it's not that it has to be obvious right up front, doesn't have to be that big world changing topic even, but is there some way that I can connect this to the audience to help them care about it or to get them to care about it, so that they will want to pay attention and that this speech will have some impact there? What's the rhetorical situation? Meaning, what's the context for the speech? Is this a lighthearted after-dinner speech? Is this a eulogy to funerals? Is it very serious in that regard? Or is it, what's the purpose here? Or is there a workshop that you're giving at your place of business where you're talking about something where you're supposed to be the expert on this topic? In which case that topic may be identified for you already. So what's the rhetorical situation? What's going to be an appropriate topic? And is this going to be a good topic for that specific situation? Is there room for persuasion? If you're giving a persuasive speech, you want to know, is there room for persuasion here? Most topics are not entirely black and white, but we need to know, is there a possibility for persuasion in this audience and does this topic allow for that? And then is it narrow enough in scope? Is it specific enough? And here there are a couple things you need to consider. First, time constraints, how long are you supposed to speak? How long is the speech? Then how broad and deep is the topic that you can get into? When we think about narrowing the topic, we think in terms of depth and breadth. Breath meaning how much across the spectrum of this topic can I get into? When you're talking about, you don't just want to give speech on history. That's pretty broad. There's a lot of history or even just on wars. If you're giving a short speech, you're not going to have time to cover the entire revolutionary war, civil war or whatever. You're going to have to pick something much more specific in terms of breadth. And then you're also going to have to consider the depth. How much time do I have to get into details here? And really what we're looking at is where's the sweet spot in terms of the combination of those things? I need to identify based on the time that I have allotted for this speech and based on where my audience's interest is going to lie and things. How much breadth do I need to provide? Am I able to provide? And how much depth am I able to provide? And we need to balance that out given those different circumstances. So when it comes to thinking about what topics we might be able to do, there are a couple of different brainstorming activities that we can do to help us try and identify if we're just starting with a blank sheet of paper. We can talk about whatever we want. There are a couple of brainstorming things that can help us start to narrow down some topics and get closer to where we want to be. One is word association. You start writing down stuff. You start writing down what are my hobbies? What are things I know about as we talked about those first couple of questions? What do I really care about? What do I know about? Just start writing things down and then writing down words that are associated to those things. If you're passionate about animals, then animals is a pretty broad topic. So we need to be a little more specific. But you could just start, okay, animals. So I'm passionate about I love dogs or I love wildlife conservation or I love birds. And I want to talk about some specific bird sanctuary or something. We can start doing word association to try and identify some of these topics. Another more organized or directed brainstorming activity is called concept mapping, where we start again with that one core idea in the middle and then we kind of branch. What are some of the branches that come off of that? What are some of the branches that come off of those branches and eventually getting more and more narrow and specific as we branch out from that central topic? Till we get to an idea where we feel like, okay, this is appropriate. I can find an appropriate level of breadth and depth within this topic. So these are just ways that we can go about, again, if we're starting from a blank piece of paper or we got a blank slate and we can do whatever we want to with it, these are ways that we can begin to narrow down some of these topics. So hopefully you've seen that topic selection doesn't have to be as complicated as we sometimes make it, especially, you know, people get excited when they hear, well, I can talk about whatever I want until they realize, oh my gosh, I can talk about whatever I want. But, you know, there are ways to help narrow it down. The main thing is to do so as quickly as possible. If you have three weeks to prepare for a speech, you shouldn't spend the first two and a half identifying a topic. You ought to identify a topic, take some time, identify within a day or two, though, and then get to work on putting that speech together in detail, right? So whatever you're going to do, pick a topic and move forward with it. Try and pick from those three areas. What am I passionate about? What do I know about? And what's going to be relevant for this audience and of interest to this audience? Stick in that area and you'll be fine. You won't have to sweat it out when it comes to making a selection for a speech topic.