How to choose your purpose in oral communication?
If your communication is to be effective you must plan it with a specific purpose in mind. Ask yourself especially what your aim is with the particular audience. What do you wish your listeners to do? Add to their knowledge? Accept your point of view? Your purpose may be any one or combination of the following:
1. To inform the listeners (add to their facts and ideas, increase their wisdom, strengthen their judgment, and enlarge their ways of looking at problems), primarily through expositional devices (“How the copying machine in my office works”).
2. To interest or entertain them, chiefly through narrative dramatic, and descriptive devices (“My one day of house to house selling”).
3. To arouse them to praise or blame, usually through your tribute to an individual, institution, idea, or attitude (“Why Independence Day is obsolete”).
4. To convince them of the truth or falsity of an idea or attitude (“One suggestion for retaining your individual freedom and personality in a mass society”).
5. To stimulate them to reflective thinking on a problem (“How can we solve the problem of downtown parking?”) 6 To persuade them to follow a given course of action (“Vote for my candidate in the coming election”).
7. To achieve some combination of these motives.
It is almost impossible and certainly unwise to confine your materials to one of these purposes exclusively. They support each other. To be sure, you must have a primary aim, such as to inform. But even a short talk will generally be more effective if it has elements which interest, inspire, and even convince.
