Books are a great place for "Material"

One of the major challenges for many beginning speakers is figuring out what to talk about. Most of these beginning speakers have a great many things they are doing and hope to do but often do not think about those things as speech material. We do a lot of brainstorming in my Coker College classes to come up with speech ideas. While I hear from many of these student that they don't read I continue to encourage them to look to books for both subjects and for speech-content material.

We are in a season when lots of people are summarizing their reading of the past year and I think some of these lists could be useful for speakers looking for ideas. Tim Elmore, who is a leadership trainer and also a frequent speaker, just posted his 12 top books from 2010. This is a good example of a list that could help others begin to find "material" for their talks -- both in class and in their real lives. This idea is not only good for students but can also work for people who are members of Toastmasters and other speaking groups.

I just finished a book by Steven Johnson about where ideas come from and this book could be good for a year's worth of speech material. In addition, he has a major bibliography in his notes section that is excellent for people who might be thinking, writing and talking on such subjects as innovation and creativity, learning, leadership, etc.