13.6 Structure and Theme

I wish I still had a paper I wrote in high school. It wasn’t a speech, but it would have made a great one. It was about the English band Jethro Tull, and was the first serious research project I had ever undertaken (this is the part where I could go off on a tangent about how hard it was to research a rock band before the internet, but that’s beside the point). My teacher asked, “What is the theme of your paper?” I replied, “It’s about Jethro Tull.” “No, that’s a topic, not a theme. What’s your theme?” I got a little exasperated and kept saying “It’s about Jethro Tull.”

Looking back, I am grateful for his patience; it took me quite a while to grasp the difference. When I finally got it, it taught me a significant early lesson about the nature of communication. After many rounds of back and forth with him, I caught on: “My theme is: There has never been another band like Jethro Tull.”

The teacher was satisfied, I was off and running, and since the actual paper is lost to the sands of time, I can get away with remembering it as the greatest high school research paper ever written.

In case that example doesn’t make it clear: a theme is something that can be stated as a simple declarative sentence. Imagine it as the answer to “What are you saying about the topic?” I could have written an infinite number of papers about Jethro Tull, and each could have had a different theme: the band was overrated or underrated, they exemplify the progressive rock scene in 1970s England, they were a fad, they changed music history, they should have called it quits in 1980, etc. The difference between topic and theme illustrates the difficulty in distinguishing informative speeches from persuasive ones, since “what are you saying about the topic?” sounds a little like “what do you want to persuade the audience of?”, but even an informative speech should have a theme.

What difference did it make for my paper? Before I settled on that theme, I gathered a lot of information and wondered what to do with it. Rattle it off in sequential order? (“They formed in London in 1968, then this person quit, then another person joined….”) That would get very tedious very fast. Some public speaking teachers have their students start off by giving an introductory speech about themselves, and they can be tedious in the same way: “I went to middle school here, and high school here, and I like sports and music and…”.

Having a theme, on the other hand, gives you a purpose that helps you decide what to put into the speech, and how to talk about it. It’s the way to answer the audience question, “Why are you telling us all this?”

In my Jethro Tull paper, for example, instead of methodically plodding through personnel changes (which is not what made them a unique band), I focused on the fact that they had a flute player, which hardly any other rock bands have ever had, and that they blended old English folk styles and hard rock guitar. If something contributed to the theme “There has never been another band like them,” I put it into the paper, and if it didn’t touch on that theme, I left it out (they all had long hair, but so did every other rock band in those days). This focus guided my decision-making, in much the same way that “with great power comes great responsibility” frames everything about the original Spiderman movie (see Chapter 3).

How do you come up with a theme for your speech? That’s not easy to spell out in a textbook, but going back to our list of ways to find topics may give you some thoughts:

• A new advancement (for example, what kinds of art can AI do well, and what does it do poorly?)
  • Theme: “Artificial Intelligence isn’t actually intelligent” or “It’s a miracle they figured out how to make this”
• Something scientific (when you get an itch, what exactly is going on?)
  • Theme: “It doesn’t work the way you think it does”
• Something historical (how did people trim their fingernails in the old days?)
  • Theme: “Things were tough back then” or “People are ingenious”
• An interesting place you or someone you know has visited
  • Theme: “You never really understand your own home until you visit somewhere really different”
• A fascinating person you read about, met, or know personally
  • “This person inspired and influenced many other people, including me”
• An experience you or someone you know lived through
  • Theme: “Hardship makes you stronger”
• A skill you mastered…or failed at
  • Theme: “It’s not as simple as it looks” or “Patience pays off”
• Something you learned on the job
  • Theme: “The public doesn’t appreciate what goes on behind the scenes”
• Something you learned in another class
  • Theme: “Learning this made my life better”
• A form of art you like (favorite movie, TV show, podcast, music genre, unusual craft or hobby)
  • Theme: “This teaches you about human nature.”

For persuasive speeches, the theme can be even simpler: “This has got to change!,” or “It’s time to rethink your position,” or “They need your help to fix this problem.” As the Spiderman example illustrates, you can take themes from movies, songs, fairy tales, common sayings, jokes, or memes.

The main point here is that your theme should guide every decision you make about your speech: how to boil down the information to the most important points, how to structure the speech, and how to begin and end it. (Watch this video to see why the theme of The Lord of the Rings, “even the smallest person can change the course of the future,” made the filmmakers decide not to include a scene they spent three days shooting).

What if you can’t think of a theme right away? Don’t worry. It’s probably going to be a back-and-forth process: although it’s ideal to have your theme in mind before putting the speech together, it might not be until you actually work on the speech that a clear theme emerges. Circling back is a natural part of the process. The phrase “circling back” implies that you’ll probably need to revisit and rethink things several times; if you’ve written 80% of the speech without a theme, and then the theme finally comes to you, then you might have to go back and rewrite that 80%. The worst thing here is to tack on the theme as an afterthought, without integrating it into the whole speech.