Case Assignment: Patriotism,”Case Assignment: PatriotismCase Assignment: PatriotismCase Assignment: PatriotismIf you’re one of the millions wanting to show your patriotism by getting a star-span- gled banner tattooed across your back, ask questions regarding its potential risks.2Sheena also used proximity to motivate her audience to empathize with people who suffer from exposure to toxic mold:Headaches, fatigue, dizziness, and memory impairment seem like ailments that each person in this room has had at one point, right? You stay up late cramming for an exam. The next day, you are fatigued, dizzy, and cannot remember the answers.3It does not matter so much how or when you demonstrate proximity. But it is es- sential that, like Chandra and Sheena, you do at some point establish that your topic is of vital personal concern to your listeners.Introduce the Subject Perhaps the most obvious purpose of an introduction is to introduce the subject of a speech. Within a few seconds after you begin your speech, the audience should have a pretty good idea what you are going to talk about. Do not get so carried away with jokes or illustrations that you forget this basic purpose. Few things will frustrate your audience more than having to wait until halfway through your speech to figure out what you are talking about! The best way to ensure that your introduction does in- deed introduce the subject of your speech is to include a statement of your centralPurposes of Introductions 185CONSIDER THEAUDIENCE186 CHAPTER 8 Introducing and Concluding Your Speechidea in the introduction. For example, in introducing his speech on the needs of the aged, this speaker immediately established his subject and central idea:If you take away just one thing from what I have to say, I hope you’ll come to un- derstand in the next few minutes that the exploding population of seniors demands a conscious, considered, and collaborative response to plan for the health, financial, and social implications of an older population.4Establish Your Credibility A credible speaker is one whom the audience judges to be a believable authority and a competent speaker. A credible speaker is also someone the audience believe they can trust. As you begin your speech, you should be mindful of your listeners’ attitudes to- ward you. Ask yourself, “Why should they listen to me? What is my background with respect to the topic? Am I personally committed to the issues I am going to speak about?”Many people have so much admiration for a political or religious figure, an ath- lete, or an entertainer that they sacrifice time, energy, and money to hear those celebrities speak. When Pope Benedict XVI travels abroad, people travel great dis- tances and stand for hours in extreme heat or cold to celebrate Mass with him. But ordinary people cannot take their own credibility for granted when they speak. If you can establish your credibility early in a speech, it will help motivate your audience to listen. One way to build credibility in the introduction is to be well prepared and to appear confident. Speaking fluently while maintaining eye contact does much to con- vey a sense of confidence. If you seem to have confidence in yourself, your audience will have confidence in you.A second way to establish credibility is to tell the audience of your personal ex- perience with your topic. Instead of thinking you boastful, most audience members will listen to you with respect. In a speech to a group of women executives, the pres- ident of the St. Louis, Missouri, Board of Education offered this insight into her ex- perience:If any of you have ever had the blessing of serving on a school board—and that’s what I consider it to be, a blessing—you know how difficult it is. There are always too many needs to meet, never enough money to meet those needs, and a multi- tude of competing stakeholders who know exactly how you should allocate scarce resources: on the one thing that matters most to them, which is always different than what’s important to the person standing next to them. And that’s when times are good and things are going well.5Preview Your Main Ideas A final purpose of the introduction is to preview the main ideas of your speech. As you saw in Chapter 7, the preview statement usually comes near the end of the in- troduction, included in or immediately following a statement of the central idea. The preview statement allows your listeners to anticipate the main ideas of your speech, which in turn helps ensure that they will remember those ideas after the speech.You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker

failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

• The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.ADDITIONAL INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE CLASS

  Discussion Questions (DQ)

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