Chapter Six. The Best of References
In Chapter Five, we discussed six things that a good opening might need to accomplish:
establish a common ground between speaker and audience
Set the tone for the speech
Reinforce or establish the speaker's qualifications
Arouse interest in the subject
Take advantage of the speaker's "grace period"
Segue smoothly into the subject
Then we discussed four of the five categories of speech openings—the novelty opening, the dramatic opening, the humorous opening, and the question opening—leaving the fifth category, reference openings, for a longer discussion in this chapter.
In a reference opening, the reference can be to any number of things. It often, but not always, has some relation to the speech or the event. A ...
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