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Here we might use the analogy of having a yard sale at your home, something you might have done or helped a
family member to do. The first step, before putting up signs or pricing items, is to go through your closets and garage
and creating “piles” of items: what you want to sell, what should probably just be discarded, what you want to keep
but store elsewhere, what you might want to give away. Then you take the “sell” pile and separate it into categories
such as children’s items, tools, kitchen items, furniture, etc. This second phase of sorting items is so you can put
them outside on your lawn or driveway in a way people expect to see items and would be more likely to buy. You
would probably not sort items by color or size, although you could. It’s just that your customers are not looking for
“blue” items or “big” items as much as they are looking for kitchen items, baby clothes, or furniture.
Researchers have found that “chunking” information, that is, the way it is grouped, is vital to audience understanding,
learning, and retention of information (Beighly, 1954; Bodeia, Powers, & Fitch-Hauser, 2006; Whitman & Timmis,
1975; Daniels & Whitman, 1981). How does this work in practice? When you are doing your research, you look at the
articles and websites you read and say, “That information relates to what I read over here” and “That statistic fits
under the idea of . . .” You are looking for similarities and patterns. That is exactly what you do when you group
anything, such as the items at a yard sale, where you group according to customer interest and purpose of the items.
Finally, if a piece of information you found doesn’t fit into a group as you do your research, it may just not belong in
the speech. It’s what we would call “extraneous.”
A good example of this principle is if you are doing a demonstration speech. It may or may not be required in your
class but is the kind of speech you may be called upon to do in your future work. For example, a nurse may be
teaching patients how to do self-care for diabetes, or a computer trainer may be showing how to use software. The
temptation is to treat the procedure as a list of steps, which may number as many as twenty or thirty steps.
There are very few times we can remember a list of twenty or thirty items. Yes, you learned the alphabet of 26 letters
when you were a child, or all the state capitals, but you have probably forgotten how long it took. Plus, you probably
learned a song to help with the alphabet, and you also did not understand the point of the alphabet; it was just
something you did with other children or to please your parents. In the case of the state capitals, you probably used
flashcards or memory aids.
Adult learning and listening is different. We need information “chunked” or grouped into manageable categories. So,
instead of listing twenty or thirty discrete steps in the process you are demonstrating or explaining, you would want to
group the steps into three to five logical categories to help the audience’s reception and retention of the message,
using the separate steps as “subpoints.”
Finally, because your audience will understand you better and perceive you as organized, you will gain more
credibility as a speaker if you are organized, assuming you also have credible information and acceptable delivery
(Slagell, 2013; Sharp & McClung, 1966). Yun, Costantini, and Billingsley (2012) also found a side benefit to learning
to be an organized public speaker: your writing skills will improve, specifically your organization and sentence
structure. This was no surprise to one of the authors, whose students often comment that they were able to organize
their essays and papers for other classes much better after learning good organization principles for speaking.
Patterns of Organization
At this point, then, you should see how much your audience needs organization. You also know that as you do
research, you will group together similar pieces of information from different sources in your research. As you group
your research information, you will want to make sure that your content is adhering to your specific purpose
statement and will look for ways that your information can be grouped together into categories.
Interestingly, there are some standard ways of organizing these categories, which are called “patterns of
organization.” In each of the examples below, you will see how the specific purpose gives shape to the organization
of the speech and how each one exemplifies one of the six main organizational patterns. In each example, only the
three to five main sections or “points” (Roman numerals) are given, without the other essential parts of the outline.