As we have learned, the overall purposes of the informative presentation can be to describe, demonstrate, or explain something to your audience. For this assignment, you will choose a topic that interests you and decide which of the three forms of informative speaking you would like to fulfill in presenting to your audience. You must be able to includes references to credible outside sources, (at least one for each main point of your presentation) so be sure to select a speech topic that has scholarly sources written about it. The natural tendency is for us to want to show how to do something as opposed to telling the audience. For this presentation, however, we will not be using visual aids. Therefore, it is very important that you use effective language in the delivery of your presentation as we learned in Week 1. This will help you to learn to be vivid in your delivery of a presentation without the use of presentation aids. A great presentation is well organized and easy for the listener to understand. Your audience has only one opportunity to understand the message conveyed in your presentation. This assignment requires that you create a formal outline. A formal outline is detailed and written in complete sentences instead of using a keyword or sentence fragment for each point.

Creating a formal outline will assist you both in developing your ideas and in following the organizational patterns that you have learned in this week’s readings and discussion forum about delivering presentations. A great presentation is well organized and easy for the listener to understand. Your audience has only one opportunity to understand the message conveyed in your presentation. It is important to have a clearly established audience for your presentation and to consistently adapt the content of your presentation for that audience.

For examples of acceptable and unacceptable ways of developing your formal outline, please review the Sample Outlines document.

Create your formal outline using the Informative Presentation Outline Template. The template includes all of the elements that are required for the outline.