Importance of Choosing a Good Topic

A good topic will not only interest your audience, but also give you the ability to give a great speech that your audience will applaud.

Topic Choice and the Four Elements of Public Speaking

With Sincerity, Enthusiasm, Confidence and Simplicity (SECS) you will find it easy to become a good public speaker. Choosing a good topic also goes a long way in giving you these qualities and abilities.

Do not forget that your speech will be delivered to an audience. It is more likely that your audience will be engaged by your speech if they feel that the speaker is invested in the topic they are speaking about. Therefore, it is important to choose a topic that you are excited by and find interesting because this will likely come across in the speech that you give, increasing the likelihood that you achieve your speech's purpose.

Let's look at each SECS element, and how it pertains to topic choice, in detail.

Sincerity

As mentioned above, the SECS principle is made up of four key elements with sincerity as its first element. A speaker must be sincere if one wants to communicate with any audience – whether it is one person or one hundred.

A good topic will help you be sincere.

Sincerity means a number of things; it means being honest with your audience, it means you believe in what you are saying, and it means that you believe what you have to say will be of interest (and benefit), to your audience.

If, in fact, you are not being honest and you don’t really believe in what you are saying, this will very quickly become obvious to your audience—in which case, don’t waste their time or yours.

Enthusiasm

The second element of the SECS principle is enthusiasm.

You must have a genuine enthusiasm and personal interest in what it is you want to talk about, and a good topic will genuinely enthuse you.

Confidence

The third element of the SECS principle is confidence. You need to be convinced that what you say is true, that it is worth saying, and that it fulfils a purpose.

In order to acquire this conviction you must be confident that you know your subject. While it does not mean that you have to know everything there is to know about your subject (no one can ever claim that sort of knowledge), you should perform whatever research necessary in order to fully understand the subject for discussion.

A good topic will give you the confidence you need to deliver a good speech.

Simplicity

The fourth element of the SECS principle is simplicity: keeping your presentation simple, logical and straightforward.

This does not mean that your talk should be simplistic; it means that your message must be uncomplicated, unambiguous, to the point, and understandable. Choosing a good topic, one that you know about and are comfortable speaking about will help you keep it simple.

John Zimmer on the Importance of Topic Choice

For an example of the importance of topic choice, John Zimmer gives his account of winning a Toastmasters contest:

In the fall of 2008, I had the terrific experience of competing in the Toastmasters Humorous Speech Contest in District 59 (18 countries in Continental Europe). The contest has four rounds – Club, Area, Division and District – with each round becoming increasingly difficult. I am proud to say that I made it through all four rounds and emerged victorious against some very nice and extremely funny people.One of the many lessons learned from that experience was the importance of choosing a topic with which the audience can identify. Because I was speaking to 250 Toastmasters, what better topic than Toastmasters itself? The speech was a spoof about our great organization.If you are not a Toastmaster, much of the humour would be lost on you. In fact, after the contest I was interviewed on World Radio Switzerland. Prior to going on air, the host asked if I could do part of the speech live. I declined because, as I told him , many of his listeners (who are not Toastmasters) would likely not find it that funny and would probably wonder whether there had been a mistake in the judging!

Again, a good topic is one in which the audience can identify with. If they can't, you'll lose them. What may be a good topic for Audience A might not be good for Audience B.