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.

This is an element similar to argument from deduction, when one of the premises is deliberately omitted. Also called enthymeme. This omission serves a few purposes, when:

1. You want to omit obvious premises (such as the existence of air, gravity, sun, etc.)
2. You want to omit a part of reasoning to simplify or to shorten your speech
3. Your audience has a common understanding of your premises (e.g. you probably do not want to explain electric current on an electricians' conference, and the other way around in a school)
4. You want to deliberately omit weak premises (we discourage doing that)

Enthymemes are similar to common themes (topos), which are the common knowledge, experiences, culture that connect you and your audience. Enthymemes are a form of reasoning based in common themes and other premises.

Used properly they can make the speech more dynamic, leave out all unimportant elements to your reasoning and focus on the main points and key information. This will make your speech more concise, less boring and will help in keeping audience engaged.

Reference is an addres to a common context between you and your audience. It helps to establish some relation between the speaker and the audience.

A reference can be made to the venue your speech takes place on, common experience, common people and even to earlier parts of your speech.

An allusion is similar to a reference, if you are not going to name directly the thing in common, but still the message will be easy to anyone to understand.

It can be used to attach positive or negative connotations to anything, by finding some links between your topic and people known as virtuous or descpicable by your audience. Be sure not to make it comical, unless your goal is satire.

When to use?

• Whenever you want to establish a common ground with your audience.
• As a kind of humour - but make sure you'll not base all of it on references only.
• To discover common needs and problems.
• To remind of earlier parts of your speech.

Consider making not too many references when discussing hard to understand topics, as they require some cognitive effort from your audience.

A quote can perform one of the following functions:

1. Shows an opinion as a starting point for your reasoning or as an idea to be considered by your audience
2. Inspires to action or amplifies your argumentation in a similar fashion as an appeal to authority
3. Counterbalances your own points and further develops understanding of the topic
4. Summarizes your ideas in a clear and concise way, easy to spread further.

A well put quote can improve audiences' impression of you - they might identify that as a sign of being well-educated and well-read. However, a quote cannot stand on its own, so it needs to be tightly coupled to your main points.

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.

Reference is an addres to a common context between you and your audience. It helps to establish some relation between the speaker and the audience.

A reference can be made to the venue your speech takes place on, common experience, common people and even to earlier parts of your speech.

An allusion is similar to a reference, if you are not going to name directly the thing in common, but still the message will be easy to anyone to understand.

It can be used to attach positive or negative connotations to anything, by finding some links between your topic and people known as virtuous or descpicable by your audience. Be sure not to make it comical, unless your goal is satire.

When to use?

• Whenever you want to establish a common ground with your audience.
• As a kind of humour - but make sure you'll not base all of it on references only.
• To discover common needs and problems.
• To remind of earlier parts of your speech.

Consider making not too many references when discussing hard to understand topics, as they require some cognitive effort from your audience.

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.

Example (exemplum in Latin) is a reference to events that are not directly related to the topic discussed, but may be used because one can draw similarities between them. If there is no such example in the world, you can make a visualisation of how would the things go given a set of assumtions related to the topic, and from then reason out consequences of these assumptions, decisions and issues that would happen given that the assumptions were true.

Real-world examples

Search for similar events that happened in the past. These events might differ from your case in some assumptions (e.g. different countries and laws, smaller or bigger scale, experimental / production status). Do not be afraid to bring even some exotic examples as they can potentially help prove at least part of your reasoning.

You can also use these events to describe what has been done in the past. It can be a good ground to discuss why your solution is innovative and better than the competition.

Hypothetical what-if scenarios

This argument is based on a visualization of a world, where you make a few controlled changes and form a logic-based reasoning showing what would happen to this world under the changes implemented.

It's very similar to how science-fiction writers construct their stories. Make one or two key changes and let the consequences play out on their own. Try to find out how such change would affect people living in the near and far future - or if that change was introduced in the past, what has been changing until now? Are there benefits to these changes? Are there problems or issues to them?

When describing examples to your audience be ready to answer some questions and objections. Such speculation is often hard to predict all of the consequences and other people can draw conclusions on their own. If you want to deliberate on the best solution for a given problem all these objections should be somehow addressed.

You can focus on benefits of your solution or focus on losses and possible catastrophic consequences of not choosing your solution. Of course, do not overdrammatize here.

Consider putting your auditorium in the center of your visualization, how they would behave, how they would act. This allows for more interaction and engagement.

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.

By using speech, eye contact, stage movements and gestures simulate a real object, situation, person in a specific point on the stage. Just like you were putting a holographic projection on a stage.

Typically you are going to leave 0 seconds in this part's duration field, as on-stage images typically take place during another part (such as a story, introduction of a concept, etc.)

A success of on-stage image is based on the consistence of illusion and your performance. This is why this technique is one of the more difficult ones, as not only it requires you to have a great understanding of your speech, but also it requires you to be aware of all the images you've planted onto the stage. One inconsistency can shatter this image.

This element will typically be used in your conclusion. It is here that you paraphrase your whole speech into actionable points for your audience to follow. The speech up to this moment was explaining problems and possible solutions, but at this moment you are going to put the tools into the hands of your audience. You can call to do a specific thing, to stop doing a specific thing or to maintain status quo.

How to end with call to action? E.g.:

1. Self-reference your opening statements.
2. Make an example - I'm already doing that. Will you?
3. With a simple anecdote that visualizes what would happen if we started doing the action now (or in near future).
4. Presenting data in memorable format - If all of us spent one less minut with lights on...

Focus on the power to spread the idea by using memorable, short sencences. Consider answering the question: What your audience should tell somebody who does not know anything about the topic?