Skills needed in informative discourse

The informative speech is one of the most important and practiced communicative expressions within the field of public speaking. It has a high value since its objective is focused on transmitting knowledge and educating the audience on a given topic.

Informative speeches have contributed to democratize knowledge and make it available to the majority. Thanks to the skills of the speaker and his team, it is possible to capture information that is relevant to an audience, in such a way that a clear, concise and understandable message can be interpreted and communicated to all.

The speaker must not only make use of his or her communication skills, but these must be combined with a wide range of comprehensive skills that make up a specialized profile when conveying a particular idea or message. In the case of informative speeches, the above is even more evident, since the complexity of this type of communicative act demands from the transmitter a solid professional training based on multidisciplinarity.

During the development of this session, we will be addressing some of the skills needed to develop a quality informative discourse.

Research skills: When we think of informative discourse, one of the first skills that stand out are research skills. Few communicative acts demand as much research as this one, so the speaker should be trained in the study of the scientific method to contrast and evaluate the data available to him. We must understand that when we seek to inform, our opinion takes second place.

We must focus on ensuring that the content we are going to transmit is of high quality, verifiable and contrasted by the existing scientific evidence on the subject. When you want to address very complex issues, you may need to call on specialists in that field or a wider staff to help you during the research process.

Communication skills: As in almost all public speaking scenarios, communication skills are essential to convey a concise and understandable message to the audience. In informative discourse, these skills are manifested in the ability of the speaker to assimilate and process large amounts of information in order to structure it into a coherent message and adapt it to the communicative level of the audience.

Many of the topics we wish to address may be too technical or complex for popular understanding; therefore, the communicator must know how to make the essential ideas easy for his audience to understand. The content of the speech is the basis on which the speaker's communicative intent revolves, knowing how to maintain a balance between quality and simplicity: it is a task that demands high communicative skills.

Journalistic skills: Journalistic skills should motivate the communicator of the speech to not only stay with the information he/she has received, but to work to contrast it as much as possible. While it is true that there are scenarios where we must adhere to the research done by others, sometimes it requires our astuteness and expertise to know how to identify if a piece of information is sensationalist or does not adhere to reality.

The fact that the type of discourse we deal with has an informative purpose means that the facts we seek to communicate have not been generated by us. This expresses the need for us to contrast the information, since each person interprets the facts from his or her own vision and experience. The responsibility for our interpretation must be assumed once we have been able to verify the information for ourselves, independently of the external criteria on which we base ourselves.