General Informative Purpose & General Persuasive Purpose

General Purpose is TO INFORM:

Your aim is to enhance the knowledge and understanding of your listeners and to provide information that they did not have before.

Informative speeches can focus on objects, people, events, concepts, processes, or issues. Always remember that your purpose in an informative speech is to share information with an audience, not to persuade them to do or believe something.

General Purpose is TO PERSUADE:

Your aim is to go beyond giving information to espousing a case, to change or structure the attitude or actions of your audience. Usually, speakers attempt to persuade others for pure reasons do so because they believe in what they are persuading an audience to do or think.

When attempting to get at the core of your speech which is the specific purpose, you need to know a few basic things about your speech. First, you need to have a general purpose, we discovered about that just moment earlier. Once you know whether your goal is to inform or persuade picking an appropriate topic is easier.

Depending on the general purpose, you will have a range of different types of topics. For example, let’s say you want to give a speech about hygiene. You could still give a speech about hygiene no matter what your general purpose is, but the specific purpose would vary depending on whether the general purpose is to inform (discussing hygiene practices around the globe) or to persuade (discussing why people need to adopt a specific hygiene practice).

If you realize, in each of these cases, the general purpose alters the topic, but they are still about hygiene. When discussing specific purposes, we are concerned with who, what, when, where, why, and how questions for your speech.

Once you’ve determined the who, what, when, where, and why aspects of your topic, it is time to start creating your actual specific purpose.

First, a specific purpose, in its written form, should be a short, declarative sentence that emphasizes the main topic of your speech.

Let’s look at that topic in terms of a general purpose and specific purpose: examples: