What is Speech?
Speech has 3 categories. Original Oratory, Informative Speaking, and Declamation. Speech categories entail the performance of a memorized 7-10 minute speech with a 30 second grace period. Speeches usually pertain to societal issues or topics. All performances should end persuading or informing your audience in the most impactful way.
- Informative speaking consists of imparting knowledge of an important and relevant subject to an audience in an inventive and interesting way utilizing rhetoric, performance, humor, and visual aids. You have ten minutes to describe, clarify, illustrate, or define an object, idea, concept, or process and its impact. The goal is to educate, not to advocate.
- Original Oratory consists of emphasizing a problem in the world or among society through rhetoric, humor, example, and delivery, and then drawing on your audience’s empathy to instill in them an obligation to solve it. You have ten minutes to leave your audience crying, inspired, or with a new - and perhaps somewhat embarrassing - self-awareness.
- Declamation consists of analyzing a historical speech to find your truth in it, and then using the tools of delivery - voice pitch and fluctuation, gestures, volume, tone, etc. - in order to make that truth into a coherent, dramatic experience your audience can take part in.
SPEECH STRUCTURE INFOGRAPHIC
