Tee recently started a small Public Relations firm and is preparing to give a presentation to a group of potential clients who own a local sports team. The team contacted him because they want to change PR firms and know they are currently losing money because local fans are only attending 1-2 games each year. Tee has a degree in Public Relations and did multiple internships with sports teams. As he is preparing his presentation, he considers the various things he could talk about: the general value of PR professionals, his background doing PR for sports teams, future trends in the market, how companies that do not specialize in sports do not know how to connect with fans, how much money can be lost with an ineffective PR strategy, etc. The list gets long. Tee only has 15 minutes to make his pitch, so he knows his presentation would be rushed and confusing if he tried to cover every topic on his list.

After considering it further, Tee remembers that the company called him because they want to change firms and know their current strategy is not working. So, he decides to not spend his limited time talking about the general value of PR professionals or how much money can be lost with a bad strategy. They already know these things. Instead, he focuses on the problem his listeners are facing and how his firm can solve it.

Problem: The team is not selling enough tickets because local fans are only buying single-game tickets.

Cause: PR firms that do not specialize in sports do not understand how to connect with fans and sell season tickets.

Solution: They need a PR firm with experience promoting sports teams. They need HIS firm.

Knowing that his pitch speaks directly to the concerns of his audience and builds a strong argument to hire his firm, Tee walks into the meeting with confidence.

One of the most challenging parts of creating a presentation is choosing how to organize all of the information, ideas, and supporting material you wish to include in the presentation. Students often find this challenging precisely because there is not one right answer for how a presentation should be organized. As you will see in this section, a presentation on the same topic could be organized in a variety of ways. This does not mean you should just randomly dump all of the information you have on a topic together and hope it makes sense. There are particular ways of putting information together that we call organizational patterns. The patterns included in this chapter align with different ways that people are used to processing information. Different organizational patterns are better for different purposes. So, when deciding on how to organize your presentation, your first question should be: what is the purpose of this presentation? Is your goal simply to inform your audience about a particular topic? Or do you wish to persuade them to act in a particular way?

Determining your purpose will help you determine which organizational patterns will work best for your presentation. In the following sections, we describe several commonly-used and effective organizational patterns. If your goal is primarily informative, you may wish to consider chronological, spatial, and topical organizations for your presentation. If your goal is to persuade your audience to act, you may decide upon a Cause-Effect or Problem-Solution organization.

Chronological Organization

A chronological organization means using time as your main organizational principle. Your main points represent different periods of time, and are sequenced in a way that should make it easy for your audience to follow and see the connections between points. Although it is possible to start with more recent times and move backward (which is called reverse-chronological order and is the kind of sequencing you might choose for your résumé), it generally makes the most sense to move forward through time. As we discuss in the chapter on storytelling, humans are storytellers—we like to follow how people and ideas connect and change across time—and a chronological organization traces your topic across time.

The amount of time between the main points of a chronologically ordered speech could vary dramatically, depending upon the topic. A speech on a historical topic might cover hundreds, or even thousands, of years between main points. For example, a speech on the evolution of communication technologies might have main points such as the development of written language, the invention of the printing press, the evolution of electronic communication such as the telegraph, and digital communication technologies. Such a speech would cover an evolution that happened across thousands of years.

On the other hand, the main points of a chronologically ordered speech might occur relatively close to each other. For almost any topic, you can find an online “how-to” video. These videos typically adopt a chronological organization by explaining how to do the necessary steps in a specific order. They might cover what to do at the beginning, middle, and end or before, during, and after. For example, cooking videos are an incredibly popular form of a chronologically organized how-to presentation. For virtually any meal you might wish to learn how to cook, there are videos explaining the process. The details change, but the organization is generally the same: an introduction followed by 1) an explanation of what ingredients/preparation you need to begin cooking the dish, 2) a set of actions to take in a specific sequence, 3) a display of the finished meal.

Spatial Organization

A spatial organization means using space/location as your main organizational principle. Your main points are organized by what occurs or occurred in particular places. As with a chronological organization, the scale may be very different. The places in a spatially organized presentation may be large and quite far apart, or small and close together. For example, imagine you are giving a presentation on fitness. You might present on cultural practices of fitness in India, Japan, and the United States. Or the spaces could be small or relatively close. For example, you might present on how fitness affects the health of different parts of the body. You could even organize your main points around how exercise affects different areas of the human brain. Whether separated by miles or millimeters, a spatial organization focuses the main points of your speech on what is happening in different places.

Topical Organization

A topical organization means using specific topics as your organizational pattern. This is the most general organizational pattern, as it allows you to identify any two to four major subtopics related to your overall topic and building your speech around them. A topically organized speech on videogames might include main points such as

1. The history of videogames.

2. The cultural impact of video games.

3. The development of esports organizations.

Notice that those three points are all obviously related to the overall topic of videogames, but you could probably remove any one of them and replace it with a different main point about videogames and the speech could still work.

The strength of this organization is that it offers a lot of flexibility for you to focus on whatever information you deem most important and interesting to your audience. The weakness of a topical organization is that it requires more work on your part to help the audience understand how the chosen subtopics relate to one another. Most topics could be divided into a surprisingly large number of subtopics, so part of your task in a topically organized presentation is to demonstrate why the particular subtopics you chose are important and how they fit together.

Cause-Effect Organization

A cause-effect organization helps audiences recognize connections. This organization can be used for informative speaking, but it is particularly useful if your goal is to change your audience’s beliefs about a topic. By explaining how one phenomenon (the cause) led or leads to another (the effect), you can help listeners understand relationships between things they may not have recognized before. A cause-effect organization can allow you to explain how things happened in the past, are currently happening, or will happen in the future. This can help your audience see things in a new way and, if done well, rethink their existing beliefs. For example, you could explain how the spread of capitalism affected global living standards. Or you could focus on the future and explaining how things in the present will have effects in the future. For example, a cause-effect speech on climate change might be organized as follows:

1. Human activity has greatly increased the amount of greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere.

2. Greenhouse gasses trap heat and contribute to climate change.

3. If this trend continues, the resulting climate change will lead to rising sea levels, extreme weather, massive disruptions to agriculture, and the extinction of many animal species.

Here you see a logical progression from an initial cause (humans releasing greenhouse gas), to a general effect (climate change), to specific effects (rising sea levels, extreme, weather, disruption to agriculture, animal extinctions). Depending on your topic, you could also potentially decide to reverse the order and start with the effects. You could tell your audience about a future of flooded cities, massive hurricanes, food-shortages, and animal extinctions. Then you could tell them that all of these are future effects of climate change. Then you could tell them that specific human actions are contributing to climate change.

This second presentation might be more emotionally impactful, but there are benefits and drawbacks to each approach. Progressing from causes to effects makes it easy to see the logical connections between your points. If you have provided good evidence that humans contribute to the release of greenhouse gasses, and that greenhouse gasses trap heat and contribute to climate change, then it is more difficult for your audience to reject or downplay the specific effects that you mention in the final point. On the other hand, if you start by presenting the potentially shocking effects of climate change, you may create immediate interest and emotional investment in a presentation on a topic that most of your audience has likely heard about. However, if you don’t first establish the cause-to-effect relationship, it might be easier for resistant audience members to downplay or dismiss the specific effects that you are describing. This is an example of where audience analysis might inform your choices. If you think most of audience likely believes climate change is real, but they do not particularly care about the topic, starting with a vivid depiction of the effects might be an effective way to get them to care and be interested in the topic. If you think they likely disagree that climate change is occurring, you might be better served starting where you agree (no one doubts humans contribute to the release of greenhouse gasses), and then carefully making connections to the general effect and specific effects.

Problem-Solution Organization

A Problem-Solution Organization articulates a problem and advocates for a specific solution to that problem. It is an organization that works if you are trying to get your audience to act in a specific way. The main goals a speaker must accomplish are convincing the audience that 1) the problem is substantial enough to need solving, 2) the proposed solution is the best solution to that problem, 3) they should take a specific action to help enact the solution.

Audience analysis is an important part of preparing any presentation (see Chapter 4), but it is particularly important for persuasive presentations. This is because you goal is not just presenting your topic in a way that keeps your audience’s attention; it is also to persuade your audience members to DO something after the presentation as a result of the information you present. This is not an easy task, and it requires you to craft your argument carefully. You should ask yourself a number of questions before deciding how to build your argument. These questions include the following:

1. Does my audience agree this is a problem?

2. What does my audience already know about this problem?

3. How does my audience think this problem affects them?

4. Are there ways this problem affects them that they might not realize?

5. What kinds of actions could my audience realistically take to solve this problem?

You should try to answer each of these questions before writing your presentation. You will obviously not know everything your audience knows or believes about your topic. But you can at least make educated guesses based on what you know about your audience. The answers to these questions will guide how you choose to talk about your problem and what solutions you propose.

If your audience does not think the issue you are presenting on is a problem, your first task is to persuade them otherwise. To do so, you may wish to explain the variety of negative effects that result from this problem. This process begins in the relevance statement in your introduction, but it is worth covering further in your description of the problem. You should do your best to connect these negative effects to your listeners and how they experience the world. Unfortunately, it is more difficult to get people to act to solve problems if they do not believe the problem will affect them or people they are close to. However, many problems have some effects that are easily recognizable and other effects that are less-obvious and more far-reaching. Consider a topic such as unpaid internships. It is unlikely that most audiences have spent a lot of time thinking about the ethics or effects of unpaid internships, and highly unlikely most audiences consider them a substantial problem. If you wanted to argue that they were, you might organize the main points of such a presentation by 1) explaining the scope of the problem (how many students are working for free as part of internship programs), 2) arguing that there are many negative effects of this huge supply of free labor (lower paying jobs for college students and new graduates, further disadvantages for students who cannot afford to participate in unpaid internships), and 3) propose a solution (our university should require all internships to pay at least minimum wage).

If your audience agrees with you that the issue you are presenting on is a problem, you are facing a different persuasive challenge. The challenge you are facing is more about efficacy: Is the audience not already acting because problem you are discussing complex enough that your audience does not know what solutions are likely to work? Or are the commonly proposed solutions to the problem so large that audience does not know what they could do to make those solutions happen? If your audience already agrees that the problem exists, you can spend less time establishing the problem Instead, you need to focus on persuading them that you have the right solution for the problem and that they can act in a specific way that will help bring about your proposed solution. Consider a topic like global hunger: your audience presumably agrees that huge numbers of children starving is a problem. So why are they not already acting to solve the problem? Global food access is a complex problem, and most people have little idea what they could do to help solve the problem of hunger. So, you might organize the main points of such a presentation by 1) explaining the problem, 2) clarifying the causes (e.g. more than enough food is produced globally, but the distribution is very uneven), and 3) proposing a solution for how to get more equitable food distribution and letting your audience know about a particular organization that is doing important work to make that happen and how your audience can support that organization.

You may have noticed that the previous examples of presentations were organized to progress from problems to solutions, but both had three main points. The difference came in whether a second point was allocated to establishing the various ways the problem affects the audience or to focusing on the causes so that the audience believes you are offering the best solution. The choice to add a main point focusing on the causes or effects of a problem should be guided by your audience analysis and what you think is the biggest barrier to overcome in getting them to adopt your proposed solution. When attempting to persuade an audience to act, you should begin by identifying your purpose, analyzing your audience, and determining which information is most important to communicate to that particular audience. This will help you select the organizational pattern that best focuses your presentation.

When organizing your speech, you will need to make a pair of choices in terms of balancing sometimes competing options of how to allocate your speaking time. The first balance is between A) What is likely to be interesting to your audience vs. B) What information your audience needs in order to accept your thesis. In the course of doing research for your presentation, you are likely to find lots of information (such as stories or studies) that your audience would find interesting. Some of this information will provide important support for your thesis or main points. Some of it will not. Just because an audience might find something interesting does not mean you should include it in your speech. However, sometimes you may encounter information that is relevant to your speech and that you are certain your audience would find fascinating. Even if that information isn’t essential to convincing your audience or supporting your thesis, you may want to find a way to fit it in your presentation as a subpoint or even as your attention getter.

The second balance is between A) spending a roughly equal amount of time on your main points vs. B) allocating your time on the topics of your speech that are most important to establish. Generally speaking, spending a roughly equal amount of your time on each of your main points is a good idea. However, your audience will still be able to follow your speech if one point requires a bit more or less time than the others. If you are planning on presenting for eight minutes, you might set out to spend about two minutes on each of your main points and one minute each on your introduction and conclusion. As you write each section, you may realize that you are able to say what you want to say in your first two points in 90 seconds each, but that your third point requires two and a half minutes. This is probably an acceptable balance that will be understandable to your audience. On the other hand, it can be confusing to a listener if your points are too unbalanced in length. Audiences may struggle to follow your presentation if you say in your preview that your presentation will cover three main points, and you then cover the first two in 30 seconds and then spend five minutes on the third.

In both of these considerations, you should aim to find a healthy balance. A speech that is packed with interesting information that does not connect to the thesis is just random information. A speech that is focused solely on advancing the thesis, with no consideration of what will be of interest to the audience, is likely to quickly lose the attention of listeners. A speech that cuts out essential information in order to keep the main points exactly balanced will be less effective. A speech with a major imbalance in the length of the main points could be confusing to an audience. There is not a single right answer for how to navigate these considerations, but it is generally wise to avoid going to either extreme.

TRANSITIONS/SIGNPOSTS

Transitions are sentences or phrases that you place between the main points of your presentation. Transition statements serve multiple functions: First, they help your audience stay oriented and follow along by letting them know you are moving from one point or subpoint to the next. This is why they are sometimes called signposts. Second, they can help you establish the connection between the ideas in your speech. Because of this, they are essential to helping your audience follow along and understand your speech.

Transition statements generally contain two main elements: 1) an internal summary and 2) an internal preview. An internal summary is a brief summarizing of the preceding main point. This should take no more than a sentence or two. It might even be done in half of a sentence. The goal is not to provide a detailed review of what you just said, but rather to summarize it in a sentence so that the audience can easily understand how the previous main point connects to the next main point. You then follow the internal summary with an internal preview, which provides a brief overview of what will be in the next point. Your internal preview should also usually be no more than a sentence or two.

A transition can be as simple as naming the main point that you are concluding and the one that you are about to start. For example, returning to the example topical speech on video games, you could say “now that I have described the history of video games, I want to tell you about their cultural impact.” This is not a particularly interesting sentence, but it gives your audience a clear sense of where you are in the speech and helps them follow along. For the speech on climate change, where connecting causes and effects is important, you might say something like “As you can see, there is a clear scientific consensus that greenhouse gasses trap heat and contribute to climate change. So, what does that mean for our generation? If we stay on this path, the resulting climate change will lead to rising sea levels, extreme weather, massive disruptions to agriculture, and the extinction of many animal species.” Notice that this is still basically a restatement of your main points. Simply putting them together with a brief question in the middle not only tells your audience that you are transitioning between points, it also makes the connection obvious.

From these examples, it should be clear that transition statements require very little additional writing and take little time out of your speech, but help your audience better understand and follow your presentations. As such, transition statements are amongst the most low-effort/high-impact ways to help your presentations be more effective. Yet they are often overlooked, or even left out entirely, by speakers who lack adequate training. Don’t be like those speakers. As you move between the main points of your speech, you should always take a moment to include a transition.

No matter the topic of your presentation, it is important to consider how to best organize the information you are presenting. Most presentation topics could be sensibly organized using multiple organizational patterns. However, the resulting presentations would be very different.

When deciding how to organize your information, you should first identify your purpose. Is your goal to inform or persuade? If your goal is to inform your audience, you might organize your information chronologically (by time), spatially (by space), or topically (by subtopic). If your goal is to persuade your audience to change their opinion on an issue, a cause-effect organization might be most effective. If your goal is to persuade your audience to act in a particular way, an organization progressing from problem to solution would generally work best. No matter your speaking goal, thoughtfully organizing your information in a pattern your audience can easily follow is an essential part of accomplishing it.