Developing and structuring ideas aloud
What develops means, and the test for it
- Develops means the speech ends somewhere it could not have started: an idea is complicated, tested or turned over, not restated with new examples.
- The most common Level 3 speech is a Level 2 speech: it states a position, supports it three times, and restates it. That is sustained and not developed.
- Three things are not development, and all three feel like it: more support (a fourth example moves nothing), more intensity (emphasis), and a bigger claim — escalating from this bus route matters to public transport is a right is the same idea at a larger scale, and it costs the specifics that made the small version convincing.
- The first-and-last test. State your opening idea in one sentence and your closing idea in one sentence.
- If they are the same sentence, the speech has not developed, however good the middle is. If the closing sentence could have been written before the research, it has not developed either.
- Run it on the plan, before writing. A passing pair: we should keep the overnight station becoming the case for keeping it is not the one we have been making.
How to find the complication
- Five routes take a speech somewhere new: complication (what makes the simple version wrong), reversal, consequence, deepening and contrast (where your position stops being true). Complication is the strongest aloud, because an audience feels a turn happen in real time.
- To find it, write the opposing case as though you believed it, in three sentences, using its best evidence, then ask which of the three you cannot answer. That sentence belongs roughly at the midpoint.
- It must cost you something. Of course there are two sides is a politeness. I came here to argue for keeping the station, and I cannot get around the callout numbers is the kind of sentence an audience knows you did not have to say.
Repetition of phrasing versus repetition of ideas
- A listener cannot re-read, so everything you have been taught about speaking — repeat for clarity, signpost, restate at the end — pushes you toward restatement, which is what this standard penalises. The distinction that resolves it: repetition of phrasing is good oral technique, because a line brought back three times makes the shape of the speech audible, while repetition of ideas is a failure of development.
- Use both at once: repeat one sentence at each movement and let its meaning change because of what happened in between. The words are identical and the idea has developed. The diagnostic: if the repeated line means exactly what it meant the first time, you have written a refrain, not a structure.
Structuring for the ear: movements, not points
- Build the speech from three or four movements. A movement does one job — establishes, complicates, resolves. Beyond four, a listener stops tracking.
- Give every movement one concrete anchor — an object, a place, a number that appears only there. Anchors keep movements distinguishable in memory.
- A movement must do something the previous one could not. If two are interchangeable you have two points, and points can be delivered in any order.
- Choose a shape. Problem, complication, resolution is the reliable default; circular — open on an image and return to it transformed — is the most effective aloud, because the return is audible; chronological is the weakest, because time is not an argument.
- Signpost transitions, never the plan. Today I will talk about three things gives away the only structural suspense you have. Signal the relation: that is the case as it is usually made — here is what it leaves out.
- Additive connectives are the diagnostic. A speech joined by also is a list wearing a structure's clothing. Argumentative connectives — but, so, which means, even so — name a relation, and a relation is what a structure is made of.
- Plan the ending before the middle. Endings that land: the return, the narrowed proposal, the cost stated plainly. Endings that do not: the summary, the escalation, and any new idea in the last twenty seconds.
Worked Example
Worked Example
A student researching their town's summer water restrictions has: six summers of hosepipe bans; a reservoir built in 1974 for 4,000 people in a town now 7,300; a council report saying 31 per cent of treated water is lost to leaks; meters proposed at about $180 a household; and their own opening view that meters are unfair. Plan it two ways.
Answer:
Plan A — chronological. 1974, the reservoir is built; the town grows; six years of bans; now meters, which are unfair.
Diagnose Plan A. Facts in the order they happened, so nothing complicates anything else, and the closing judgement — unfair — is the opening opinion arriving unchanged. First-and-last test: failed. Notice too that the leak figure has no place here. The strongest material is what a chronological plan discards.
Plan B — two positions.
| Movement | Content | Anchor |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | What a ban looks like here — one garden, six summers running | The dead lemon tree |
| 2 | The case for meters at full strength. Demand has doubled since 1974 | The 1974 figure: 4,000 |
| 3 | The complication. 31 per cent never reaches a house, so meters charge households for water the network loses | The 31 per cent |
| 4 | What survives. Meters are unfair not in principle but in this order | The $180 |
Diagnose Plan B. The movements cannot be reordered: 3 only means something after 2, and 4 only exists because of 3. First-and-last test: meters are unfair becomes meters are unfair in this order — different, and only reachable through movement 3. Passed.
And the last line, written first: a hundred and eighty dollars is a fair price for water. It is not a fair price for someone else's leak. Drafted before movements 2 and 3, it determined what they had to contain — the ending planned the middle.