Guide to Delivering an Informative Speech in College

Time Limit for Informative Speeches

Informative Speech
Time Limit: 4-6 minutes. It is important that you meet this time criteria. You will lose points if you are short or long based on the following formula: the percentage of time short or long divided by two. Please consult the “Informative Speech Time Deduction” sheet, posted on Canvas.
As a guide, a 4-6 minute speech manuscript will roughly contain 750 words.

Delivery: All your speeches need to be delivered extemporaneously. You are limited to the number of note cards and the content on your note cards. Your note cards should contain key words and phrases, not complete sentences. The only exception to this is a direct quote. 
You are limited to using only one side of each note card. You are allowed a maximum of six note cards for this speech. Your note cards can contain a maximum of 25% of the written content of your speech.

Purpose: The primary objective of this assignment is to inform or teach your audience about a topic of interest. 

Topic Selection: You cannot do another process speech here. Please stick to objects, events, or concepts. For more information, please consult chapter 15.
Make sure your topic has interest to both you and your audience. Keep in mind that I am not looking for you to present information that can be easily found by reading an encyclopedia. I am looking for original thought and research. Since this is a college course you need envision an audience of college students. Be very careful if you want to give an informative speech about a person. Please choose an original topic. Overdone topics such as the death penalty and abortion should be avoided. You CANNOT recycle previous papers or research from other classes.

Organization: Please consult Chapter 9 in the text for instruction on organization. Please limit your main ideas to 2-3 for this speech.

Presentation Aid: You are required to develop a PowerPoint or similar electronic presentation for this speech. You will not actually use this based on the limitation of this class format. You will upload it to for me to look at while watching your speech. It will be graded based on how professional it is and whether it would’ve helped your presentation. Your aid needs to be used throughout your speech, not just in part of it. If you have questions about this, please email me.

Your speech must have a minimum of four outside sources, two sources must be non-internet. you can have more than four sources in your speech. these sources need to be cited orally in the body of your presentation. if you want to use a source in the introduction or conclusion of your speech you may but you still will need four in the body. remember, people are skeptical of the information found on the internet. citing printed material is considered more credible. Information from gale, or other electronic databases, is considered non-internet. a maximum of 15% of the total length of your speech may be quoted. if you paraphrase or summarize correctly, you should have a very low similarity percentage. no quote should be more than three lines. penalties up to failure will result if the percentage is higher. remember that the purpose of research is to establish understanding of the material. i am not looking for regurgitation of information. be careful and cite what you need to cite only. if you have questions about this, you need to email me. do not use wikipedia or similar encyclopedia sources. you are not allowed to use interviews as sources unless you have my permission.