A speech is defined by what you want the audience to do when you sit down. An informative speech leaves them understanding something they didn't. A persuasive speech leaves them agreeing with you, or ready to act. A motivational speech, sometimes called inspirational, is for people who already agree: it leaves them willing to do the hard part.
Below are six short original speeches, two of each type, every one under three minutes read aloud and followed by a note on why it works. Beside them are brief excerpts from public-domain speeches by Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Michael Faraday, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. The last section shows how to write your own.
The three types side by side
Real speeches mix all three. A good informative talk has a persuasive edge (this is worth knowing), and every persuasive speech has to inform before it can argue. But each speech has one main job, and that job decides the structure, the evidence and above all the ending.
| Informative | Persuasive | Motivational | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goal | InformativeUnderstanding | PersuasiveAgreement or action | MotivationalCommitment and energy |
| The audience starts | InformativeCurious or unaware | PersuasiveUndecided or opposed | MotivationalAgreeing, but tired or doubtful |
| Usual structure | InformativeRoadmap, three points, recap | PersuasiveProblem, solution, objection, ask | MotivationalShared story, honest difficulty, next step |
| Main evidence | InformativeFacts, examples, one good comparison | PersuasiveEvidence plus answers to objections | MotivationalSpecific stories about real effort |
| Ends with | InformativeA recap they can repeat | PersuasiveOne specific ask | MotivationalOne action for this week |
| It worked if | InformativeThey can explain it to someone else | PersuasiveThey changed their mind or acted | MotivationalThey did the hard thing |
The quickest way to see the difference is to keep the topic fixed and change the job. Here is one invented topic, a community garden on a lot the city wants to sell, opened three ways.
Informative, to new members: “The Elm Street garden has forty-two plots, a waiting list of sixty names and one water meter, which the city pays for. In the next five minutes I'll explain how a plot gets assigned, what it costs you, and why the waiting list moves so slowly.”
Persuasive, to the city council: “The city plans to sell the Elm Street lot next spring for twelve parking spaces. I'm asking you to sign a five-year lease with the garden instead, and in the next two minutes I'll show you why that's the better deal for the city.”
Motivational, to volunteers a week before the vote: “Last April this lot was gravel and broken glass. Tonight there are forty-two plots, and one of them grew a pumpkin Mr. Okafor couldn't lift. The council votes next Tuesday. Between now and then, I need every one of you to do one thing.”
Same facts, three jobs. The informative opening promises a map. The persuasive one states its ask in the second sentence, to the people who can grant it. The motivational one starts from a story everyone in the room shares, and only then points at the work.
Persuasive speech examples
A persuasive speech asks for something specific: a vote, a signature, a change in habit. The ones that work state the ask early, give two or three reasons the audience cares about instead of six it doesn't, and answer the strongest objection before anyone in the room can raise it. That last move is the one most first drafts leave out.
The first example is a public comment at a city council meeting. Many councils time these, so it fits in two minutes.
Good evening. My name is Dana Whitfield, I live on Carver Street, and I'm here about item seven, the library's Sunday hours.
I'm asking the council to keep the Main Street branch open on Sundays from noon to five, and to pay for it by moving the bookmobile's Saturday route to every other week.
Here's why. Sunday is the one day the branch is busier than any weekday. The library's own counts from last year show an average of 310 visitors on a Sunday afternoon and 190 on a weekday. Those visitors are not who you might guess. They're kids doing homework because their parents work weekends. They're people on the public computers applying for jobs, because applications don't wait for Monday. And they're the English conversation group, which has met on Sundays for six years.
I've heard the objection that the bookmobile serves people who can't get to the branch at all, and that's true. But the Saturday route averaged eleven visitors a trip last year. Running it every other week saves almost exactly what Sunday hours cost, and the library director has told me she'll post the new schedule at every stop.
So the choice in front of you isn't whether to spend more. It's whether to spend the same money where three hundred people are, or where eleven are.
Please keep Sundays. Thank you.
Why it works. The ask arrives in the second paragraph with its funding attached, so the council can't file it under wishes. The reasons are people, not adjectives: kids at the homework tables, job seekers, a conversation group. She raises the best objection herself, concedes what's true in it and answers the rest with a number. The close is a juxtaposition the council can repeat during the vote: three hundred people or eleven. In terms of ethos, pathos and logos, her address is the credibility, the counts are the logic and the homework tables are the feeling, each in two sentences or fewer.
Attention. Last semester I kept a list of every dinner I ate. Out of 112 nights, I cooked nine. The rest were cereal, drive-throughs and something from a gas station that called itself a burrito.
Need. I don't think I'm unusual. A lot of us will leave this school in June able to solve a quadratic equation and unable to make a dinner that costs less than five dollars. Next fall, when many of us live somewhere without a cafeteria, that gap starts costing money every day, and it costs more than money when the cheap option is always the fried one.
Satisfaction. Here's my proposal. Add a six-week unit to senior health class: five dinners, one a week, and a week on shopping. Rice and beans. A stir-fry. A pasta sauce that doesn't come from a jar. A soup. Eggs, five ways. The school already has a teaching kitchen, and it sits empty after third period.
You might say cooking is a parent's job. For some of us it is, and those students could test out in a day. For everyone else, school is the only place it's going to happen.
Visualization. Picture next October. You're in an apartment with two roommates and forty dollars until Friday. Without this unit, that's four days of instant noodles. With it, it's a pot of chili that feeds all three of you twice, and you're the one who knew how to make it.
Action. There's a petition on a clipboard by the library doors. Two hundred signatures puts the proposal on the school board's agenda in December. Sign it on your way out, and then find me at lunch and tell me what your five dinners would be.
Why it works. It follows Monroe's motivated sequence, the five-step structure the speech professor Alan H. Monroe developed at Purdue University in the 1930s: attention, need, satisfaction, visualization and action. It suits any speech that ends in a request, because each step answers the question the previous one raised. The evidence is the speaker's own (nine dinners out of 112), which nobody in the room can dispute. The objection gets two sentences, enough to show it was heard. And the action is small and physical: a clipboard by a door, not a call to “get involved.”
From history: Douglass and Anthony
“Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued.”
“For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.”
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?”
Douglass was asked to speak for Independence Day by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Sewing Society, and he insisted on the fifth of July rather than the fourth. Look at what he does with the objection. He states it in the audience's own words (argue more, denounce less), then refuses its premise: some things are too plain to debate, and debating them would admit they were open. The paired images, light and fire, shower and thunder, are parallelism, one of the rhetorical devices that make a line stick. The central question turns the audience's own holiday into the evidence. And for all its anger, the speech ends, in his words, “where I began, with hope.”
“It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.”
“The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons?”
Anthony opened by naming her indictment, so the charge against her became the subject of the speech. Her argument runs on documents the audience already accepted. The Constitution's preamble says “We, the people.” The dictionaries of Webster, Worcester and Bouvier define a citizen as a person entitled to vote. So the only open question is whether women are persons, and phrased that way it has one answer. Giving it completes her case. The repeated “we” narrows twice and then widens, which is the whole argument in a sentence. She was fined $100 after her trial and refused to pay it.
Informative speech examples
An informative speech has done its job if listeners could explain the idea to someone else on the way home. Arguing is out of scope. Clarity is the whole game. The tools are plain: say what's coming, keep to three or four main points, mark each one as you reach it, give one comparison to something familiar, and recap at the end. On paper that looks repetitive. Out loud, it's how a listener who drifted for ten seconds finds their place again.
Every tree on this campus is keeping a diary, and it's written in a language you can learn in about three minutes.
I'll cover three things: how a tree makes a ring, what a ring can tell you, and how scientists use rings to date things that have nothing to do with trees.
First, how a ring forms. In places with clear seasons, many trees add one layer of wood a year, just under the bark. In spring, when the tree grows fast, the new wood is pale and soft. Later in the summer, growth slows and the wood comes in darker and denser. One pale band and one dark band make one year. Count the pairs from the bark inward and you have the tree's age.
Second, what a ring tells you. A wet year with a long growing season makes a wide ring. A drought year makes a narrow one. So a slice of trunk is a weather record, with the most recent year on the outside. Think of it as a bar chart the tree drew for you, one bar per year.
Third, how scientists use it. Trees in the same region live through the same weather, so they share the same pattern of wide and narrow years. Match the pattern in a beam from an old building to the pattern in living trees, and you can date the beam to the year its tree was cut. That matching is called cross-dating. Chain enough overlapping pieces of wood together and the record runs back thousands of years. The bristlecone pine record from California's White Mountains reaches back about 8,500.
The field has a name, dendrochronology, coined in 1928 by an astronomer. You don't need the name. You need four ideas: pale and dark make a year, wide means a good year, narrow means a hard one, and every tree in a region tells the same story.
Next time you sit on a stump, read it.
Why it works. The first line promises an easy payoff, and the second names the three parts, so the audience knows how long to hold on. “First,” “Second” and “Third” are signposts: a listener who drifts can rejoin at the next one. Each point ends on a sentence that could stand alone. The one comparison, a bar chart, is to something every student has drawn. The recap fits the talk into four clauses. And it never tips into advocacy. A plea to save the forests would be a different speech.
Good morning, and welcome to Corliss Print. I'm Ruth, I run operations, and for the next couple of minutes I'm going to tell you what your first week looks like, so nothing on your calendar surprises you.
There are three things to know: where to be, who to ask, and what you'll have done by Friday.
Where to be. Today and tomorrow you're in this room, nine to four, learning the order system. Wednesday you shadow someone on the floor. Your badge tells you which team. Thursday and Friday you work your own queue, with a buddy beside you.
Who to ask. Your buddy first, for anything about the work. Me, for schedules and pay. And Marcus at the front desk for anything broken: badges, laptops, the coffee machine. Especially the coffee machine.
What you'll have done by Friday. Ten real orders, start to finish. That's the only goal for week one. Nobody expects speed yet.
So: this room, then the floor, then your own queue. Buddy, Ruth, Marcus. Ten orders. If you remember nothing else from this morning, remember those three lines.
What can I answer before we start?
Why it works. Briefings fail by covering everything. This one picks three things and says so up front, then opens each section with its label repeated word for word from the roadmap, which is how listeners keep their place without slides. The recap is a list short enough to say in one breath. One dry joke, once. And it ends on an open question rather than “any questions?”, which tends to get silence.
From history: Michael Faraday
“There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy, than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.”
“And now, my boys and girls, I must first tell you of what candles are made.”
Faraday built six lectures on one ordinary object and used it as a door into a whole science. Before teaching anything, he tells the audience why the subject deserves their time. He speaks to children at their level without talking down, and he demonstrates as he explains, lighting, blowing out and relighting things on stage, so the idea and the evidence arrive together. The lesson for any informative speech: find one concrete thing that carries the abstract idea, and show it. He closes the series hoping his listeners will “shine as lights to those about you”: an informative talk can end on a lift, as long as the rest stays on task.
Motivational speech examples
A motivational speech is for people who already agree with you. Arguing with them wastes the time. What they need is a reason to keep going and a next step small enough to take tomorrow. The weak version stacks slogans. The strong version tells one specific story, admits what will be hard and ends on something to do. Specific praise is show, don't tell at a lectern: “you rebuilt the arm at eleven on a Thursday” beats “you worked so hard.”
Six weeks ago our robot couldn't drive in a straight line. Some of you remember the video. Priya posted it with the caption “modern art.”
Tonight it drives straight, it picks up the ring nine times out of ten, and it climbs. I watched Jonah and Mei rebuild the arm three times, and the third time was at eleven o'clock on a Thursday night, with a chemistry test the next morning.
Tomorrow something will break. It always does. A chain will slip, or the battery we swore we charged won't be, or the field will be a little different from ours. I'm not going to tell you it won't happen. I'm telling you we have already fixed everything this robot can do wrong at least once, and we can fix it again between matches.
So here's the plan. Pit crew, you own the checklist, and nobody touches the robot without it. Drivers, you get one sentence of feedback after each match, from me, and then we forget it. Everyone else, you're scouting, and you're loud in the stands.
We didn't get here because we're the best team in the building. We got here because we kept fixing things. Tomorrow we do that ten more times.
Get some sleep. The bus leaves at six-fifteen.
Why it works. It opens on a shared embarrassment, which builds trust faster than praise. The praise, when it comes, has names and a day of the week. It predicts the problem honestly instead of promising a win, which is what makes the reassurance believable. The plan gives every person in the room a job. And the last line is logistics, which is how good coaches really end: people go home with something to do.
Welcome back. Before anything else, a confession: my novel is in the same drawer it was in last September. Some of you are in the same place with yours. I can see it on your faces.
Here's what I've noticed in four years of running this group. The people who finish are not the most talented people in the room. They're the people who bring pages. Bad pages, short pages, pages written on the bus. They bring something every other Tuesday, and over a year that adds up to a book.
So this season I'm asking for one thing, and it isn't quality. Bring pages. Five of them, every meeting, in whatever state they're in. If you bring five bad pages, we can help you make them better. If you bring nothing, there's nothing any of us can do.
I'll go first. My five pages are in this folder, and they are not good. Chapter three has a dog in it that I keep forgetting to feed. You can tell me about the dog in two weeks.
Pages, not perfection. Every other Tuesday. Let's write.
Why it works. It lowers the bar to raise the output. The confession closes the distance between speaker and room, and the one request, five pages, is concrete enough to check and repeated so nobody misses it. Then the speaker goes first, with a joke at their own expense. Going first is the most persuasive thing a motivational speaker can do, because it proves the ask is possible.
From history: Lincoln and Roosevelt
“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”
The whole address is about 270 words, roughly two minutes. The main speaker that day, Edward Everett, spoke for about two hours, and later wrote to Lincoln that he wished he had come as near the central idea “in two hours, as you did in two minutes.” The structure runs from past (“Four score and seven years ago”) to present (“Now we are engaged”) to future. Its motivational move comes in the passage above: Lincoln admits that words can't match what was done, then hands the unfinished work to the people listening. Honor the effort, admit the gap, give the audience the next part: most good motivational speeches have that shape.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood...”
Roosevelt spoke at length about citizenship, and people remember one paragraph, because it's an image rather than an exhortation. It also grants that the doer “comes short again and again,” which makes the encouragement credible, and it hands the listener a choice of roles, critic or doer, that is easy to recall when the moment comes.
How to write your own speech
Start from the job, not the topic. If you still need a topic, start with these persuasive speech topics or informative speech topics. For the full process, from audience to rehearsal, see how to write a speech.
- Finish one sentence
Write “When I stop, they will…” and finish it: know something, agree to something and do it, or commit to something they already want. If your sentence has two verbs that belong to different types, pick one. The other becomes a supporting point.
- Choose the structure for the type
Informative: roadmap, three points, recap. Persuasive: problem, solution, objection, ask, or Monroe's five steps when you want an action. Motivational: a shared story, the honest difficulty, one next step. The speech outline template has a slot for each part and a time budget.
- Budget words by the minute
At about 130 words a minute with pauses, a two-minute speech is roughly 260 words, three minutes about 400 and five minutes about 650. Check the time limit before you draft, not after.
- Write the ending first
The ask, the recap or the next step is what people take home. Draft it before the middle, so the rest of the speech has something to aim at. There are more options in how to end a speech.
- Read it aloud with a timer, then cut
Most first drafts run long. Cut the weakest point whole rather than trimming every point a little. Mark where you'll pause. Nerves speed most speakers up, so a draft that lands exactly on time in rehearsal leaves you a small cushion.
| Type | Common problem | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| TypeInformative | Common problemSix main points and no recap | FixKeep three, signpost each one, recap in one breath |
| TypeInformative | Common problemOpinion creeping in | FixMove it to the last line or cut it |
| TypePersuasive | Common problemThe ask comes at the end, or never | FixState it in the first thirty seconds and again at the close |
| TypePersuasive | Common problemThe obvious objection goes unanswered | FixName it yourself, concede what's true, answer the rest |
| TypeMotivational | Common problemSlogans instead of a story | FixOne story with names, days and details |
| TypeMotivational | Common problemNo next step | FixEnd on one action the room can take this week |
Drafting it in Strokes
If you draft in Strokes, select a paragraph and press ⌘K to ask for a version that's shorter or easier to say aloud. Open the AI Assistant beside the draft and ask it to read the speech as the most skeptical person in the room and list their objections, which is the step persuasive drafts most often skip. Version history keeps the five-minute draft when you cut to three, so nothing you cut is lost.
Frequently asked questions
What are the main types of speeches?
Speeches are usually sorted by purpose. Informative speeches explain, persuasive speeches argue for a belief or an action, and motivational (or inspirational) speeches build commitment in people who already agree. Special-occasion speeches such as toasts, eulogies and acceptance speeches borrow from all three, and a demonstration speech is an informative speech that shows how to do something.
What is the difference between a persuasive and a motivational speech?
A persuasive speech changes what people believe or do: it has to answer objections and make a specific ask. A motivational speech assumes the audience already agrees and strengthens their resolve, usually with a story, an honest look at what is hard and one next step.
How many words is a 3-minute speech?
About 400 words at a typical pace of 130 words a minute, pauses included. Speaking rates vary, so read your draft aloud with a timer before you trust the count.
What is Monroe's motivated sequence?
A five-step structure for persuasive speeches developed by Alan H. Monroe at Purdue University in the 1930s: attention, need, satisfaction, visualization and action. It works best when the speech ends in a request the audience can act on.
Can I use these speech examples for a class or an event?
Use them as models for structure, length and tone, then write your own with your own facts and stories. For a class, follow the assignment's rules on time, sources and format, and hand in work that is yours.
