You now have  written a proposal and received my comments on it and you s have a date to present your speech. Now you need to write one.

 

Outline for speech.

 

  In addition, to giving the speech in class, you will need to submit a written version of the speech. The speech should take about 15 minutes to read slowly enough so that an audience can understand your ideas. For most people, this will be about five or six pages double-spaced.  After you write your speech, read it out loud and time it so that you know that it is the right length.

 

A speech is different than a research paper or an essay and your speech should be written in a style that is appropriate to an oral presentation rather than these other kinds of forms. 

 

The first few sentence of the speech need to accomplish two goals.  First it needs to get the audiences attention. Begin your speech with something catchy that will make the audience want to listen to the rest of it.  This doesnt need to be shocking.  The ideas should be interesting enough to make someone take notice and decide to pay attention.  The first few sentences also need to give the audience some idea of what you will be talking about. 

 

Organize the speech into a series of points you want to make sure the audience takes away from your presentation.  Then develop each of these points with examples and explanations.  Make sure that the points are organized into some coherent order and be sure to make the connections between the points so that the logic of your ideas move smoothly from one idea to the next.

 

At the end of the speech, come to some kind of conclusion.  What do you want to be sure the audience has learned from your presentation?

 

In your speech, use colorful language and dont be afraid to repeat yourself occasionally to reinforce the main points.  Asking rhetorical questions or asking real questions to engage the audience is also often a good device to keep everyone focused on you. 

 

The written version of your speech should include citations providing information on the sources you have used to put it together.  If you quote someone else directly you should put the quote into quotation marks and put the authors name and the year the information was published in parenthesis like this (Aulette, 2004).  If you do not quote word for word but you have obtained information from someone else, do not use quotation marks but put the author and year in parenthesis at the end of the sentences based on the source. You need to have at least three sources. 

 

At the end of the paper, provide a bibliography with the citations in alphabetical order.

 

 

In order to write your proposal you will first need to choose a topic.  Any issue that relates to women is okay.  You can choose a topic by thinking about what is going on in the news or your own interests or experience or you can try thumbing through the text for ideas.  The speech will be written from sources from written information you find in the library or on the Internet and from interviews with people.  The speech will not be a research paper where you methodically collect data.  Rather you should think of the gathering of information for the speech as the kind of investigation a reporter might make to write an article.  In other words, in your interviews, you will be trying to get a few great comments to use in your speech to illustrate some of the ideas you want to talk about.  You should also use the library and the Internet to collect information to illustrate and support your speech.