Week 11 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 11 — Teach the Whole Room: Build and Rehearse Your Informative Speech — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Public Speaking Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 10 of the term — test your own informative purpose, sort your subject and place your strategies, prove your evidence aloud and rehearse twice, catch a chatbot's unsourced draft, and explain to a friend how to inform without taking a side.

This week you learned what makes a speech informative, the three tests of an informative specific purpose, how to sort a speech by subject and match a pattern, the clarity and retention strategies, and the promise to report a finding whole. In this assignment you work four short problems on the week's example, explain each one, build and rehearse the informative speech you will really give, and explain the idea to someone who has never taken a speaking course. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Speech Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles. It builds on Week 3's specific purpose and central idea: this week those two sentences have to teach without taking a side.

The task

This week's shared example is the running speech in its informative form, which is illustrative and attributed to no one; its three oral citations come from the course's mini-source set. Chapter 11 builds it end to end:

its specific purpose, "To inform my audience about how our campus dining hall handles its plate waste.", passes 3 of the three informative tests; Draft A, "To discuss food waste in the dining hall.", passes 2; and Draft B, "To inform my audience why our dining hall should remove its trays.", passes 1;
it places 4 clarity strategies (organization and signposting, defining terms, examples and analogies, managing the information load) and 4 retention strategies (relevance, novelty, repetition with variation, vivid support), each on one moment;
it carries 3 oral citations, and each one names who, what, and when before the evidence; and
an illustrative chatbot, asked to draft main point II, wrote "Studies show going trayless cuts food waste.", added "About 35 percent of food is wasted.", and suggested the central idea "Going trayless is the smartest way to end food waste." Checked at the source, that is 1 misreported finding, 1 unsourced statistic, and 1 arguing central idea.

Work these four problems, and show how you reached each one:

The running speech's specific purpose passes 3 of the informative tests, Draft A passes 2, and Draft B passes 1. How many tests do the three drafts pass in all?
The course names 4 clarity strategies and 4 retention strategies. How many strategies can a speaker place in all?
The running speech carries 3 oral citations, and each one names 3 parts (who, what, and when). How many citation parts does the speaker say aloud?
The chatbot's draft of main point II holds 1 misreported finding, 1 unsourced statistic, and 1 arguing central idea. How many problems does checking at the source catch in all?

Beside each answer, add one brief explanation, and use your own informative speech for the parts that ask for it:

Problem 1: write the specific purpose for your own informative speech, mark each of the three tests yes or no with a reason, and write your central idea as one declarative sentence that takes no side.
Problem 2: sort your own speech by subject (a thing or place, a person, an event, a process, or an idea), name the pattern that usually suits it and the pattern you chose, and say what question your audience brings. Then place one clarity strategy and one retention strategy on a named moment in your speech.
Problem 3: write two complete oral citations for your own speech from real sources you found and checked yourself, each naming who, what, and when before the evidence, and say how you report one finding whole. Then rehearse your speech twice and record what you notice in the shape of the delivery self-assessment table, naming the one moment you will fix. You may record video, record audio only, or have a friend with a stopwatch watch you speak to the room; no recording is shared with anyone.
Problem 4: in the illustrative chatbot draft described above (you do not need to open any tool), name its three problems (a misreported finding, an unsourced statistic, and an arguing central idea) and the fix for each, and explain why a figure with no who, what, and when cannot be said aloud as evidence.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your friend will give a five-minute talk at a library's community night explaining how the new seed-lending shelf works, and plans to end with "and that's why everyone should start gardening" after quoting a statistic a chatbot supplied. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains, in everyday words, the difference between teaching and persuading; why the closing line changes the talk's job; how to check the chatbot's statistic before saying it; and one limit, such as dropping any number with no source or keeping both halves of a finding. Explain any course term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible; this message is scored with Problem 4.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coworker who will explain a new shift-swap app at a staff meeting and plans to finish with "this app is way better than the old binder, so stop complaining." Model answer: "Your job in that meeting is to show people how the app works, not to win an argument about it. If you end by telling people to stop complaining, the ones who liked the binder will stop listening to the steps. Walk through the three taps it takes to swap a shift, and say where to get help if it fails. If you mention how many people use it, say who counted and when, or leave the number out."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own wording and examples.

Show how you got each answer. A reader should be able to check every total and every label without guessing which numbers you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single piece of work containing:

the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief explanation the task names for that problem;
your specific purpose and central idea, your subject and pattern, your two placed strategies, your two oral citations, your rehearsal record, and your critique of the chatbot draft; and
your message to the friend, explaining in everyday words the difference between teaching and persuading, why the closing line changes the talk's job, how to check the statistic, and one limit.

Keep it to roughly one to two pages. Clear and specific beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a spoken explanation recorded as audio or video of about three minutes with a transcript. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text. Your rehearsal takes stay with you; the record you submit describes them in words.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the counting, the testing, the citing, the explanations, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. Problem 4 asks you to critique a described, illustrative draft; you do not need to open any tool to do it. Submitting AI-generated work as your own or copying another student's work is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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