Discussion 1.3: Concepts

The concept that I found interesting from Chapter 4 was how important it is to consider the audience, what may be relevant to them and how much they already know about the topic. This is usually the part about speech topic selection that keeps me up late at night because I really want to be able to captivate the audience with what I’m speaking about it. When I was pondering about a topic for this upcoming persuasive speech assignment I felt slightly more constricted than usual because a lot of the topics that I thought of had already been beaten to the ground. For example, caring for the environment’s been done many an occasion – how many times in a 30-minute period do I have to watch a commercial about polar ice caps melting and polar bears consequently drowning? Yes it’s relevant, but at this point I’m sure media has already fed us enough information to where we can make an informed decision about taking environmental action. But then I figured out that whatever topic relates to them directly and individually (i.e. personal health topics) and of which they know the least usually motivates them to take action.