Summarizing Ideas

Your conclusion is the perfect place to summarize the main points of your speech. That way, when your audience leaves, the most important information from your speech will be fresh in their minds.

Summarizing means to succinctly communicate a complex or lengthy idea. In the context of your speech, it means concisely revisiting what you've just been speaking about in a way that is accessible for your audience. Summaries should be lean, only including the most crucial information and ideas.

The best way to summarize ideas in your conclusion is to ask yourself the following important questions:

What is the primary message I want my speech to communicate?
What are the most important points of my speech that convey this message?
What do I want my audience to take away from my speech?

By asking yourself these three questions, you will be prepared to write and deliver a conclusion that effectively summarizes the most important ideas from your speech.

Primary Message

It is important to always keep your primary message in mind when preparing for a speech. Throughout the entire speech you must constantly relate your research, examples, analyses, etc. back to the message of your speech. Your conclusion is no exception.

It is important to reiterate the focus of your speech again in your conclusion. By summarizing the primary message of your speech you will refocus your audience's mind back to the overall purpose of your speech and the reasons why they should care about what you are saying.

Main Points

After you readdress your primary message, it is then crucial to summarize your main points. You have just spent your entire speech speaking in depth about these points, so you'll want to be sure that you are only summarizing them and not entirely rehashing them all over again. Remember, a summary must be concise and lean. Clearly list your main points and connect them back to the primary message of your speech. There is no need to elaborate on them again or use examples—this should have been done in the body.

Audience Take-Away

Thinking about what you want your audience to take away from your speech is necessary in order to write an effective conclusion. You must decide the intention of your speech: is meant solely for educational purposes, are you trying to convince your audience to take a certain action (such as give money or vote), or perhaps you are attempting to teach them a skill.

Whatever the answer may be, it is imperative that you make your final push toward this goal in your conclusion. You can easily summarize this idea in only a sentence or two. You can even address your audience directly using the 2^nd person ("You") to help implant the message in their memory. Using call to action verbs such as "go", "do", "vote", "sign-up", etc. can also motivate audiences to engage in action.

Whatever you decide you want your audience to take away from your speech, it is important that you reiterate this in the conclusion and that you focus on simply summarizing it and not stating your entire speech all over again.

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Content created by Boundless Learning under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License, remixed from a variety of sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_(summary)
http://cnx.org/content/m15909/latest/
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Basic_Writing/Writing_about_reading
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