PICK your TOPIC

By Greg Olynyk

PICK

• Passion or Personal

• Interest (your audience is interested ?)

• Curious (willing to research it)

• Knowledge

Personal

• Ice Breaker

• Passions

• Why I Joined ToastMasters

• Your Life Story

• Personalize each Topic

• Personal Story

The Story-Telling Rabbi

• King needed a Champion

Story that suits the Topic

• Story gives credibility

• Story is more entertaining

• Story is more memorable than bunch facts

Interest

• Get to the Point

• KISS Principle with PowerPoint (quotes)

• Examples of Good and Bad (humour ?)

• Horror Stories (memorable, credible)

Curious

• Researching a Topic

• Time to Organize It

• Time to Practice it

• Why I chose “How to Pick a Topic”

Knowledge

• Life Lesson; “Figure out how to get paid for doing what you love”

• Teaching PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel…

• Teaching SAP

• Drumming

PICKing a Topic

• Passion

• Interesting

• Curious

• Knowledge

http://www.hawaii.edu/mauispeech/html/

selecting_your_topic.html• Am I interested in the topic?

• Will I enjoy researching this topic?

• Will I enjoy talking about this topic andsharing my information with my audience?

• Will my audience be interested in my topic?

• Am I passionate about this topic?

http://collegeuniversity.suite101.com/article.cfm/informative_speech_topic_ideas

• Speak about something you know about. Pick something that you already have some knowledge about. Otherwise, you're going to have to do an awful lot of research to be able to speak with confidence about your topic.

• Speak about something you care about. Enthusiastic teachers are good teachers. You know that from being a student, right? The audience isn't going to listen or learn much unless you convey to them that this is a topic worth learning about.

• Speak about something the audience will care about. This is very important. If you speak about something that is relevant to your audience, they are much more likely to pay attention and learn something.

• Choose a topic that is of interest to the whole audience. A speech about trendy women's hairstyles may be of interest to many of the females in your audience, but most of the males will not find this relevant at all. Be careful not to lose part of your audience.

• Choose an informative speech topic that's not too broad. If you choose a topic that's too broad, you're not going to have enough time to talk about it in much detail. For example, don't give a speech about "museums in the Europe." There's thousands of them, so this topic is way too broad. Narrow it down to something like "art museums in Amsterdam," and you have a manageable topic. You also don't want to choose a topic that's too narrow, but this is a much less common problem.

• Avoid topics that everyone already knows about. If the information in your speech is already known, your speech isn't going to inform them of anything new. Don't give a speech about freshman orientation or about popular student hangouts.

• Avoid highly complex topics. You probably only have a short period to speech, so explaining a technical or complicated issue well is very difficult. Complex speeches tend to be filled with jargon, or technical words that most of your audience is not familiar with.

Links ot Share…

• Suggestions for Each Speech Module;

http://www.tmdistrictone.org/speechtopics.asp

• Good Topic Checklist;

http://www.speech-topics-help.com/good-speech-topics.html

Quotes

• Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin

• Joe Lambert / Roger Schank 

• “Tell me a fact and I’ll learn.• Tell me a truth and I’ll believe.• Tell me a story and I’ll remember forever.” 

• http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/quotes/