Also called leitmotiv, a term from music theory. In your speech it can take form of just one word, one sentence, a whole situation, a hero, some mental image that is repeated enough times during your speech to be memorized by the audience.

When to use?

• If your structure is complicated, a leading motif can communicate ends of specific parts of your speech and transitions to the following ones.
• If your speech contains concepts that are difficult to explain - to introduce additional narrative that eases adoption of these concepts.
• When you want to anchor between some word or item and meaning of your speech, so that people using this word of item could remember your message.

A leading motif should be simple and known to your audience, to avoid multipicating complexity of your speech. It also can be related to something your audience identifies with.

Many speeches refer to reality in some way. Even in fiction there is a notion of the represented world, which follows a set of rules and constraints. In both cases you can refer to them by using facts.

In the simplest case, it's real evidence - an item, document that cannot be discredited by aby of the parties involved. In a judicial speech these would consist of the items found on the place of an accident.

In an informative speech these might consist of the statistical data gathered from a large sample by a reputable institution (e.g. census data).

When to use?

• When the solutions you are going to propose are derived from the factual state of things.
• When reality imposes constraints that need to be adressed.
• When you are going do use facts to determine which solutions are possible or feasible.
• When the status quo is a motivation for the hero to attain the goal and face difficulties.

For a proper presentation of facts it's important to break them down into prime factors and to remove all evidence that do not affect your conclusions.

When you lay all the facts before your audience, they will have grounds to follow your reasoning, repeating your train of thoughts in their own heads and reaching the same conclusions on their own.

You are still responsible to make interpretation of the facts, as these typically do not lead directly to conclusions.

Emphasis helps to bring out arguments that support your matter. Its is achieved by deliberately giving more time to discuss supporting argumetns and to use more emotionally charged wording, rhetorical figures or idioms to strengthen some arguments and weaken others.

To emphasize consider:

1. Changing time proportions of other arguments
2. Use gradation of adjectives (e.g. good, better, best) or based on rarity of words (e.g. good, excellent, magnificent).
3. Use flowery language to convey specific emotions.

Emphasis' function is to weaken or strengthen of an argument or a message to make it look more important, more proven or conversely more ridiculous as it is in reality. In informative speeches you can use emphasis to make your key points more significant, achieve better memory retention or simplify a hard topic.

A rhetorical question is used to perform one of the following functions:

1. An answer is obvious or alleged for most of the audience. Such question can be used as a ground to confirm or conversely, falsify such supposition.
2. An answer is not obvious, but was never considered by the audience. Such question can pinpoint holes in our common reasoning and knowledge.
3. An answer is not obvious and the audience is aware of that, but by not answering publicly, every member of your audience can stay anonymous and then contrast their own beliefs with your reasoning. Such question can suggest uncertainty to a number of valid answers for the question.

Every rhetorical question required attention. A question with unclear answers additionally push your audience out of their comfort zone and make them more interested in finding an answer to your question. It's just convenient that your speech is going to do that.

How to use?

• Give a coule of seconds for the audience to ponder upon your question.
• Make it clear that they should not answer publicly to your question at the moment.
• Avoid too simple questions, if you are not prepared to give contradictory answer. E.g. "How many is 2 + 2?" isn't an interesting question in itself until you follow it with a surprising answer, such as "it might be 1".

If a speech contains a thesis, this thesis must be supported by arguments.

Arguments can refer to different modes of persuasion - Aristotle pointed out three: pathos (simply put, emotions), ethos (simply put, your credibility and authority) and logos (data, logic - or tricks merely imitating logic).

It's worth to mention that arguments do not need to be logic-based in a formal sense. A good rule of thumb is the ARG rule (described by Trudy Govier) which says that an argument can be deduced from premises that meet the following criteria:

1. are acceptable to the audience (they refer to common knowledge, topics or in any other way are hard to falsify)
2. refer to a main premise which we want to prove with our argument (as a counterexample: Poland does not need to introduce Euro because China does not have the currency and experiences economic growth - both countries are unrelated to each other)
3. together all premises give a satisfactory ground to persuade audience that the main premise is also true (as a counterexample: all people I know earn less money than the average, so the average must be wrong)

We recommend constructing arguments that use logic to infer some premise from statistics, data, and research - if that research was conducted in an impartial manner to minimize error (for example, by using scientific method).

At the same time, a well-narrated anecdotical evidence that taps into emotions can be of similar strength (in reception) to a logical argument. However it depends strongly on the target audience. Appeals to authority are similar in this perspective.

A decision which arguments and which types of arguments should be chosen depends on the goal, message, audience expectations. If the audience needs to make a decision on their own, it's desired to put more data and logical arguments. If the speech should motivate people to do some action, arguments relying on personal stories and emotions can persuade audience.

See also: argument with omitted preposition, argument from deduction, simple conclusion, present a fact.

Despite being controversial, an appeal to authority used tactfully can make a strong, lasting impression in your audience.

Why?

By summoning a person known both to you and your audience, you have better chances to invite your audience to the world presented in your speech. Appeal to that person's behaviour or quote him or her. Your audience will identify that as a sign of being well-educated, well-read, and knowing the history of your topic.

When to use?

• As an introduction or conclusion of your reasoning, or its cohesive fragment.
• You can self-reference the authority after presenting your main points.
• Inside a longer narrative to shake up things a little.
• As a transition between narratives.

How?

• Summon people known to your audience.
• Your audience should want to undermine such people as authorities.
• You can address only favorable arguments and statements made by an authority in your case, however it's risky as you can be considered as biased.
• Your audience expect reliable sources. A Nobel prize laureate is not necessarily an expert on gardening too.

Piling-up is a technique of using multiple phrases, words, idioms and sentences with different meanings but revolving around a central topic to present a specific a

Innymi formami ampflifikacji są: uwypuklenie, referencja/porównanie i domniemanie.

It is a way to enforce cognitive effort in the audience for a moment which results in more focus on the idea and raises perceived importance of an argument. These words and sentences may be used gradually in order to make a strengthening or weakening impression.

It is important not to overuse piling-up techniques as even if it looks like you have a lot to say about the topic, it is still a single argument and your audience might notice that.

By using unspoken presumptions you can steer the speech in your direction while supporting your argumentation at the same time. In order to do that, emphasize the circumstances that led to an event or are related to a person without mentioning them directly. This way your audience will draw similar presumptions as you without you speaking directly about them.

Then you can leave the presumption as it is or you can subvert audience's anticipation by claiming that the presumption they drawn is false. With an element of surprise you can use this effect in a powerful way to support your cause.

Examples:

• Would a reasonable person, such as him, with his attachment to order and security, a man who is a father of three children, drive a car knowing that its brakes don't work? Isn't it so that he couldn't be in fact aware of that when entering the car?
• Quantum physics is a domain of smart cookies. And John here has been working in the field for 10 years now. Who else would be a bigger authority on Big Bang than him?

Emphasis helps to bring out arguments that support your matter. Its is achieved by deliberately giving more time to discuss supporting argumetns and to use more emotionally charged wording, rhetorical figures or idioms to strengthen some arguments and weaken others.

To emphasize consider:

1. Changing time proportions of other arguments
2. Use gradation of adjectives (e.g. good, better, best) or based on rarity of words (e.g. good, excellent, magnificent).
3. Use flowery language to convey specific emotions.

Emphasis' function is to weaken or strengthen of an argument or a message to make it look more important, more proven or conversely more ridiculous as it is in reality. In informative speeches you can use emphasis to make your key points more significant, achieve better memory retention or simplify a hard topic.