Informative speech examples: 7 full speeches, annotated

Good morning. Sometime this week, a customer will hand you a hundred-dollar bill, and you'll have about ten seconds to decide whether it's real. I'm Teresa, I run the cash office, and in the next three minutes I'll show you three checks that fit inside those ten seconds: feel it, tilt it and hold it up to the light. You won't need a pen or a machine for any of them.

First, feel it. Run your fingernail up and down Benjamin Franklin's shoulder, on the left side of the note. On a genuine bill it feels rough, because the ink there is raised. If it feels smooth all over, stop and look closer.

Second, tilt it. Find the blue ribbon on the front of the note. It isn't printed on the paper. It's woven into it. Tilt the note back and forth, and the little bells in the ribbon change into 100s and slide from side to side. Tilt it side to side, and they move up and down. While you're tilting, look at the copper inkwell. The bell inside it changes from copper to green. So does the large 100 in the bottom right corner.

Third, hold it up to the light. Two things appear that you can't see while the note lies flat on the counter. In the blank space to the right of the portrait, there's a faint second Franklin. That's the watermark, and you can see it from either side. And to the left of the portrait, a thin thread runs from top to bottom, printed with “USA” and “100.” Under the ultraviolet lamp in the cash office, that thread glows pink.

While it's in your hand, turn it over. The big gold 100 on the back is there to help people with visual impairments tell which bill they're holding.

Everything I've shown you comes from the government's currency site, uscurrency.gov, which also has a short video on checking a hundred if you want to see it again tonight.

So: feel the shoulder. Tilt for the ribbon, the bell and the 100. Hold it to the light for the face and the thread. If a note fails any one of those, our rule is simple. Don't hand it back. Keep it, stay polite and call a supervisor.

I've got a real hundred here. Let's pass it around and do all three.

Every word in the dictionary got there the same way. Somebody saw it in print and wrote it down.

Tonight I want to show you how that works at Merriam-Webster, using the dictionary's own description of the process. There are three stages: how the editors collect words, how they decide a word has arrived, and what happens once it's in.

First, collecting. Most of Merriam-Webster's editors spend an hour or two a day doing what they call “reading and marking.” They read books, newspapers, magazines and online publications, and they mark anything interesting: a new word, a new use of an old one, a spelling that's starting to shift. Each marked example becomes a citation. A citation is three things: the word, the passage it appeared in, and where that passage was published. For most of the dictionary's history, citations went onto three-by-five slips of paper. Today they're kept on computer as well, and the files hold 15.7 million of them. Picture the biggest pile of sticky notes you've ever seen, each one stuck to a single word in a real sentence.

Second, deciding. A word doesn't get in because an editor likes it, or because it's clever. It gets in when it turns up in a large number of citations, from a wide range of publications, over a considerable period of time. In the dictionary's own words, there have to be “enough citations to allow accurate judgments about its establishment, currency, and meaning.” Establishment means people keep using it. Currency means they're using it now. Meaning means the editors can tell, from the sentences, what it means. Once in a while a word clears that bar fast. Merriam-Webster's example is AIDS, which became established very quickly in the 1980s. Most words take much longer.

Third, defining. The editors who write the entries are called definers, and they don't work one word at a time. They take a stretch of the alphabet, say everything from “gri” to “gro,” and go through the citations for it. For each word, they decide: does the entry stay as it is, does it need revising, should it be dropped, and is there a new word here that has earned an entry of its own? So words leave the dictionary as well as enter it. When people stop writing a word down, the citations dry up.

That's the whole path. Editors read and mark. Citations pile up. A word with enough of them, from enough places, over enough time, gets a definition the next time a definer works through its part of the alphabet.

Which means the dictionary doesn't decide what counts as a word. Writers do, by using it, and the editors keep the receipts. The next time you put a new word into something you publish, you may be making a citation.

Thanks for having me. I'm Luis Ortega from the city's recycling office, and I have ninety seconds on the new green carts, so here's the one rule to take home tonight: if it grew, it goes in green.

That means food scraps of every kind, including meat, bones and dairy. Coffee grounds and tea bags. Leaves, grass and garden trimmings. And one exception that surprises people: paper that food has soaked into, like greasy pizza boxes and used napkins, goes in green too.

What stays out is plastic of any kind, including bags that say “compostable.” Our site can't tell them apart from ordinary plastic, so please leave them out.

Pickup is weekly, on your regular trash day, starting the first week of April. The carts arrive the week before, with a sticker on the lid that shows all of this in pictures.

And here's where it goes. The truck takes everything to the city's composting site on Route 9, where it becomes compost. In the spring, residents can pick that compost up for free.

So: if it grew, it goes in green. Weekly, on trash day, from April. And the compost comes back to you. What can I answer?

In July 1799, French soldiers digging foundations at a fort near the Egyptian port of Rashid, which Europeans called Rosetta, found a broken slab of dark stone covered in writing in three different scripts. The officer in charge, Pierre-François Bouchard, recognized that it mattered. It would take twenty-three years, and scholars in two countries, before anyone could read all of it.

I'll cover three things: what the stone says, why its three scripts made it a key, and how the code was finally broken.

First, what it says. The stone is part of a larger slab carved in 196 BC. Its text is a decree from a council of Egyptian priests, issued on the first anniversary of the coronation of the king, Ptolemy V, and honoring him as a divine ruler. In other words, it's an official announcement.

Second, the three scripts. The decree is written three times. At the top are hieroglyphs, the sacred script, the right choice for a decree from priests. In the middle is Demotic, the script Egyptians used for everyday writing. At the bottom is ancient Greek, the language of the Greek-speaking Macedonian kings who ruled Egypt at the time. In 1799, nobody could read hieroglyphs. But plenty of scholars could read Greek. So the stone held the same message in a language they knew and in a script they didn't. That's what made it a key.

Third, how it was broken. After the French were defeated in Egypt, the stone passed to the British under the Treaty of Alexandria in 1801, and it went to the British Museum in 1802. The English physicist Thomas Young was one of the first to show that some of the hieroglyphs spelled out sounds: the sounds of Ptolemy's name. But the breakthrough came from Jean-François Champollion in France. He realized that hieroglyphs recorded the sounds of the Egyptian language, not only pictures of ideas, and he announced it in Paris on the twenty-seventh of September, 1822.

So: a priests' decree from 196 BC, written three ways, dug up by soldiers in 1799, and read at last in 1822, because the Greek told scholars what the hieroglyphs had to say.

If you're ever in London, you can see it. It has been on display at the British Museum since 1802, except for two years during the First World War, when it was taken to a postal railway station underground at Holborn to keep it safe from bombing.

In the autumn of 1811, on the beach below the cliffs at Lyme Regis in the south of England, a boy named Joseph Anning found a skull nobody could identify. His sister Mary was twelve. About a year later, she found the rest of the animal, a skeleton roughly five meters long, and dug it out of the rock. People in town said she'd found a monster. Scientists thought it was a crocodile. It was neither.

Today I'll tell you who Mary Anning was, in three parts: how she learned, what she found, and why her name so often went missing from the science she made possible.

First, how she learned. Mary Anning was born in Lyme Regis in 1799. Her father, Richard, was a cabinetmaker who collected fossils on the side and sold them from his shop, and he taught her how to find them and clean them. When he died in 1810, he left the family in debt. Selling fossils was how they paid it off.

Second, what she found. That first animal was later named Ichthyosaurus, a reptile that lived in the sea. In December 1823 she found the first complete skeleton of a Plesiosaurus, a sea reptile with an astonishingly long neck. It looked so strange that the French anatomist Georges Cuvier suggested it might be a fake. It wasn't. In 1828 she found the first pterosaur, a flying reptile, ever discovered outside Germany. She also pioneered the study of coprolites, which is the polite word for fossilized dung.

Third, the missing name. The men who bought her fossils wrote the scientific papers about them, and they often left her out, even for the ichthyosaur. When the Geological Society of London met to discuss her plesiosaur, she wasn't invited. The Society didn't admit women. She died in 1847, at forty-seven.

Recognition came slowly. In 2022, after a campaign started by a schoolgirl named Evie Swire, a statue of Mary Anning and her dog was unveiled in Lyme Regis. And some of her specimens are on display today at the Natural History Museum in London.

So: a cabinetmaker's daughter who learned the beach from her father, found an ichthyosaur, the first complete plesiosaur and the first pterosaur outside Germany, and was left out of the papers about them. Next time you stand in front of a sea reptile in a museum, read the label and look for her name.

Every January we raise salaries by at least the rate of inflation, and every January somebody asks me where that number comes from. So here are three minutes on how inflation is measured in the United States: what goes in the basket, how the prices get collected, and what the number can't tell you.

First, the basket. The number in our pay policy is the Consumer Price Index, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes every month. The Bureau describes it as a measure of the average change over time in the prices consumers pay for a basket of goods and services. Picture one enormous shopping cart holding a little of everything households buy: groceries, rent, gas, haircuts, doctor's visits, phone bills. How much of each goes into the cart comes from a separate national survey of what people actually spend.

Second, the prices. Every month, the Bureau records prices for about 80,000 items, from thousands of stores, service businesses, rental units and doctors' offices. Then it asks a simple question: what does the same cart cost now, compared with before? If the cart cost a hundred dollars a year ago and costs a hundred and three today, prices rose three percent. That's the kind of figure you hear on the news.

Third, the limits. The index covers what people buy to live, not what they invest, so stocks, bonds and real estate are left out, and so are income taxes. It's also an average, and your own cart may look different. If you drive an hour to work, gas prices hit you harder than the index shows. If you work from home, maybe less. And the version we use, the index for urban consumers, covers over 90 percent of the population, not everyone.

So: one big cart, about 80,000 prices a month, and an average that may not match your own spending. When December's figure comes out, we'll post it on the intranet next to the raise it sets.

At two o'clock in the morning on the second Sunday in March, most of the United States skips an hour. At two o'clock on the first Sunday in November, we get it back. And around both of those Sundays, the same argument comes back too: should we keep doing this?

I'm going to explain where daylight saving time came from, how the rules work today, and what the main positions in the argument are. I'm not going to tell you which one to pick.

First, where it came from. Daylight saving time was introduced in the United States in 1918. The schedule we use now dates from 2007, when the Energy Policy Act of 2005 took effect and made daylight saving time longer. The stated goal was to reduce energy use. Moving the clocks doesn't create any daylight, of course. It shifts an hour of it from the early morning to the evening during the warmer months.

Second, how the rules work. Time zones and daylight saving time are regulated by the US Department of Transportation, under a federal law called the Uniform Time Act. A state can pass a law to opt out and stay on standard time all year. Hawaii does, and so does most of Arizona, though the Navajo Nation in Arizona does observe daylight saving time. Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands stay on standard time too. But a state that observes daylight saving time has to use the federal dates. Under current law, no state can stay on daylight saving time all year on its own.

Third, the positions. There are three. The first is to keep switching, which is current law. Its supporters point to long, light evenings in spring and summer, and to the energy savings Congress was aiming for in 2005. The second is permanent standard time. That's the position of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, which in 2020 called for ending the seasonal change in favor of standard time all year. The Academy argues that standard time fits the body's internal clock better, and it links the spring change to short-term risks, including more car crashes. The third position is permanent daylight saving time: light evenings all year, at the cost of darker winter mornings. Because federal law doesn't allow it, that one would take an act of Congress. In July 2026 the House passed a bill to do it, the Sunshine Protection Act. As I speak, the Senate hasn't.

So: introduced in 1918, on today's schedule since 2007, overseen by the Department of Transportation, and argued over by three camps. Next time the clocks change, you'll know who decided, who opted out, and what each side wants instead. Which side you're on is up to you.

“I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking—with the comparatively few who understand the mechanics of banking but more particularly with the overwhelming majority who use banks for the making of deposits and the drawing of checks.”

“I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be.”

“First of all, let me state the simple fact that when you deposit money in a bank the bank does not put the money into a safe deposit vault. It invests your money in many different forms of credit—bonds, commercial paper, mortgages and many other kinds of loans. In other words, the bank puts your money to work to keep the wheels of industry and of agriculture turning around.”

“If a well were sunk at our feet in the midst of the city of Norwich, the diggers would very soon find themselves at work in that white substance almost too soft to be called rock, with which we are all familiar as ‘chalk.’”

“A great chapter of the history of the world is written in the chalk.”