7 Steps to Make Perfect Outline for Persuasive and Motivational Speech

Writing a speech, whether it’s a persuasive speech or a motivational speech could be a daunting task, as it requires a meticulous yet interesting and appealing play of words and placement of ideas. The greatness of a persuasive speech is effectively determined by the speech outline it follows, as this is what enables a speech to truly flow and win the hearts of the listeners.

Table of Contents:

∘ Choosing the Right Topic For The Persuasive Speech

∘ Set Persuasion Objectives

∘ Make The Listeners Hooked to Your Idea

∘ Establishing Your Credibility

∘ Don’t Be Vague, Persuade with Authority

∘ Conclude By Summarizing Your Point

∘ Follow This Speech Format

Choosing the Right Topic For The Persuasive Speech

Choosing the right topic is of critical importance if you wish to see your persuasive speech really have persuasion power. For this purpose, its important that you choose the topics that you really care about, or people in general care about, such as writing a “persuasive speech about why you shouldn’t smoke.”

Similarly, writing a motivational speech at work or for high school students, also necessitates that the topic that is chosen really reverberates with the audience. And as long as the topic you choose is something the audience cares about or can be motivated to care and be concerned about, you have a very fair chance of delivering just the speech that you have been aspiring for.

Some successful yet common topic examples to take inspiration from include: Writing a motivational speech about life, Motivational Speech for the Students and Speech about shared experiences and time spent together.

Set Persuasion Objectives

Your speech shouldn’t be apologetic or ambiguous in any manner if you wish to stirrup the right emotions in the audience, for that purpose you need to make crystal clear of your objectives. Whether it's to persuade the audience about the health hazards of smoking, or Speech about a threat of Climate Change and the need to take necessary measures.

You have to first make in your mind the ultimate objective you wish to motivate and persuade towards. Put it at the top of your speech, titled under the purpose of the speech. This will help you draw out every aspect of speech in perfect coherence, and will inspire the tone, and the path you take the conversation towards.

You see!

When you assert your ideas and back them with proof while negating some of the opposing views with logic, that’s when the audience who’d be critically analysing what you are saying will be convinced with what you have to say.

Make The Listeners Hooked to Your Idea

People lose attention very quickly, and it's much difficult to get their attention back once it is lost, the teacher or the boss might have to stop speaking, or slap on the board to take you the audience’s attention back, and when speech is off to such start, it very often goes downhill from there.

To make your speech attention-grabbing, you ought to have an interesting start, something that glues the audience’s mind with what you have to say.

It could be a story, a personal experience or even an alarming fact.

Like, for a persuasive speech about climate change, you can start off by saying, “If we are to burn all the hydrocarbons today, the sea levels are expected to rise by 60-meters and most of the major coastal cities from NewYork to Shanghai will drown.”

Establishing Your Credibility

Many times I have seen people struggle with this part, the idea is that you have been assigned to give a motivational or persuasive speech about a topic, that doesn’t qualify you as an authoritative figure to assertively speak, and necessitate for the audience to listen to you with a serious attitude. Or even if it's a speech in an office space, you’ll always be driven by the thought that some colleague of yours knows more than you.

Understand this! to establish credibility, you have to express your concern about the issue, and express that you have studied it thoroughly, even for the sake of preparing the speech, and its this research and in-depth study that convinced and made your mind to say what you are about to say.

The idea is that persuasion and motivation only work when the emotions are your own, the expression and opinion are your own, regurgitating some googled facts and popular quotes is just not gonna cut it.

Don’t Be Vague, Persuade with Authority

Yesterday, I came across a persuasive speech (I write speeches as a freelance writer) about working remotely. The main argument of the speech was that most of the office jobs today don’t necessitate the physical presence of the employee, and it’ll save infrastructural costs and unnecessary hassle to embrace work from home as a new alternative. The phenomenon has been considerably accelerated by the pandemic.

However, the main flaw of the speech was that it considered people got isolated, had to suffer trauma because of a pandemic. You see these are all facts that don’t fit in your speech, working from home doesn’t mean being socially isolated as was in the case of a pandemic.

Don’t make such rookie mistakes in your persuasive or motivational speech, it is important that you are assertive, to the point and clear-visioned in your speech, and even if there are some pressing opposing points, you ought to respond to them instead of considering them, and if you convinced that opposing view is stronger than yours, change the topic! You can neither persuade nor motivate anyone about anything you yourself aren’t too confident about.

Conclude By Summarizing Your Point

In the end, as you have moved through the speech in a systematic manner highlighting major points, it is recommended that you reassert your stance by summarizing what you said and restate your stance, last words of your speech are often the most memorable, after the introduction, and carry the most impact on the audience.

Follow This Speech Format

Recommended speech sequence for a motivational and persuasive speech is the Monroe sequence, which I also follow is as follows, it’s a bit simplified that’ll help you draft your speech with ease.

Topic

Purpose What’s the main purpose (persuasive or motivational) of your speech.

Introduction

i: Attention Getter Interesting fact or story

ii: Statement of Relevance Relate the topic with your audience here

iii: Credibility Statement Relate yourself with the topic

iv: Thesis Statement Main argument of your speech

v: Main Points Preview The points your speech is going to cover

• Body

i: Main Point First point that helps you assert your stance

a: Sub-point Supporting evidence or phenomenon.

Transition Letting your audience know you are moving to the next point

ii:Second Point Follow Up Points

a: Subpoint And supporting facts and statements

Conclusion Closing your speech by reiterating your points.

Clincher Many people love it, as I do, its the addition of something funny or memorable, like for a persuasive speech on climate change you can say, “With the rising sea-levels, would you like your children to a take a boat to their school instead of a bus?”

I hope this has been a helpful read about writing a perfect speech. However, if you need me to help you with your speech, you can connect with me here.