Let's go ahead and start our discussion of ceremonial arrangement with the most common model, topical model. This is the most flexible model. It can be your go- to for a tons of speeches. What is it? A topical model is built around your key themes. So, for example, you might have three key values. So what you do is you open the speech, move to each key value, then you got your conclusion, right?You can do that for a one minute tribute speech. You can do that for a 30-minute dedication speech. The only thing that changes is how many values you have and how much support you provide. Let me give you a longer example. A few months ago, I had a student who delivered a seven minute tribute speech to John Lewis. Lewis is a congressman from the State of Georgia. He's a famous civil rights leader. Anyway, Lewis had just come to the UDAP campus and given a talk so this student had written and performed a tribute, but the speech is a really nice topical arrangement. What happened here? He opened a speech with some biographical information about Lewis. He had started in the civil rights movement very early on, he had walked with Martin Luther King, he had been arrested 40 times, he'd been beaten and brutalized. This opening was stylistically rich and it provided some background. From there, he dived into his first value, community so he starts off this section with a quotation from Lewis wanting to build America into the beloved community. He starts with a quotation, that gets us on a path. Then, he goes into a story about when Lewis was a young city councilman working to build local communities. From there, he talks about the larger value of community, included another community-based quotation from Lewis and then he ends this first major value section with talking about how the value of community had helped his, the students' Mexican grandparents feel welcome when they moved to the US. Such a nice personal link there, but done. We got point one out of the way. On to point two, leadership. He starts this section with a story about Lewis as a young boy. He talks about Lewis' experiences as a college student, as a young civil rights leader, how Lewis help passed the Civil Rights Act, lots of support here showing Lewis's leadership. That's what he's doing in this section. He ends this section with a nice line, a nice maxim. He said, "He showed us that those first steps we take in leadership are often the most difficult, but they're also the most rewarding." Okay, nice capper line to that paragraph. We've got point one out of the way, now point two. He goes onto the final value, point three. The value of forgiveness. Again, we start with a story so he tells a story. John Lewis had been beaten bloody when he was on a civil rights march. Flash forward, years later, a man visits Lewis in his congressional offices. It had been one of the guys that beat him up so the man apologizes and he offers his hand to shake Lewis' hand. Lewis doesn't shake his hand, he hugs him instead. Oh, he forgives him, right? So they met four more times. It's a great story, right? We've got background, we've got inciting incident, we've got a climax, are they going to shake hands, we've got resolution. Forgiveness allowed them to continue to meet. This student did a nice sort of stylistic justice as forgiveness point at the end of the section and then the final point blended into a short conclusion, "We thank you Congressman Lewis, " and done. The speech was built around those three values. Lots of testimonies and stories and support and that structure, that topical structure makes the speech easy to write. You can think of the values as the topic statement for each paragraph and then you write around that. Then, you just kind of talk about it approaching that value from different angles. As you're writing it you're like, "Okay, I got this paragraph on leadership. Let me see what I got in terms of support for leadership." Pull that together, write up the next paragraph and you go on to the next. In fact, this topic sentences can be stylistic. In their public speaking textbook, Bill Keith and Christian Lundberg have a nice example of parallel phrasing in ceremonial speeches. Let's say you're doing your speech focused on the value of courage. Well, your points or your paragraphs might start out with some parallel phrasing: the courage to work hard, the courage not to give up, the courage to take chances, the courage that comes from friendships that we'll never forget. That topic sentence allows you to take courage in a new direction while sounding good and reminding us of the key thing. In fact, I would say the benefit of a topical model is that it gives you focus in the writing and delivery. You know what that paragraph is going to be about, and at the end of the speech, the audience knows what the key values were. It's a flexible model but one that remains focused on your key values.
