15.3: Conclusion: Informative Speaking
Brooke Lyle
Informative speaking asks you to do more than assemble facts. It requires you to actively guide your audience toward clearer understanding. Throughout this chapter, you explored how to choose accurate information, adapt complexity to the audience, and organize ideas into meaningful patterns. You learned to create “information hunger,” to make ideas memorable, and to distinguish among the many types of informative speeches. Most importantly, you discovered how Rowan’s explanatory models help transform complicated or unfamiliar material into something your audience can genuinely grasp.
Beyond the podium, these skills matter because clear explanation is one of the most powerful communication tools you can develop. Whether you are helping a coworker troubleshoot a process, explaining a difficult topic to a friend, teaching others in a professional role, or presenting in academic and civic settings, your ability to articulate information accurately and ethically builds trust. In a world where misinformation spreads quickly and attention is limited, speakers who communicate with clarity and responsibility stand out.
Ethics also remain at the heart of informative speaking. Being honest about evidence, selecting appropriate supporting material, checking for accuracy, and acknowledging the limits of your own knowledge are not just academic expectations—they are essential habits of credible communicators. When you commit to ethical explanation, you model the kind of communication that strengthens workplaces, communities, and public life.
Key Takeaways
- One important reason for informative speaking is to provide listeners with information so that they can make up their own minds about an issue.
- Informative speeches must be accurate, clear, and interesting for the listener.
- Strategies to make information clear and interesting to an audience include adjusting the complexity of your information to the audience, avoiding jargon, creating concrete images, limiting information only to what is most relevant, linking information to what the audience already knows, and making information memorable through language or personalization.
- A variety of different topic categories are available for informative speaking.
- One way to develop your topic is to focus on areas that might be confusing to the audience. If the audience is likely to be confused about language or a concept, an elucidating explanation might be helpful. If a process is complex, a quasi-scientific explanation may help. If the audience already has an erroneous implicit idea of how something works then a transformative explanation might be needed.
References
Lucas, Stephen E. (2004). The art of public speaking. Boston: McGraw-Hill.
Rowan, K. E. (1995). A new pedagogy for explanatory public speaking: Why arrangement should not substitute for invention. Communication Education, 44, 236–249.
