Writing a Genuine Significance Section
The significance section answers the audience's unspoken question: so what? You'll learn how to write significance that feels earned and specific rather than generic and tacked on.
What Significance Is (and Isn't)
Significance explains concretely why the audience, personally or as members of a broader community, should care about what they just learned — it is not a vague closing statement like 'this topic is important for everyone.' Strong significance ties back to specific facts from the speech rather than introducing brand-new, unsupported claims.
Layers of Significance
Effective significance often works in layers: personal relevance (how this affects the individual listener), community or societal relevance (how this affects a broader group), and sometimes a forward-looking layer (what happens if this trend continues or if awareness spreads). Not every speech needs all three layers, but even one specific layer beats a vague generalization.
A speaker's early significance draft for her antibiotic resistance speech reads: 'This is important because antibiotics matter to everyone.'
Revised significance: 'The next time you get a simple infection, the antibiotic that once cured your grandparents in days might not work on you at all — and if resistant bacteria keep spreading at current rates, routine surgeries could become as dangerous as they were a century ago.' This version layers personal relevance (your own future infections) with a forward-looking societal stake (the future of routine medicine), both tied to facts already established in the speech.
1. What distinguishes strong significance from a vague closing statement?
Answer all 1 to check.
Write significance in specific, layered terms — personal, community, and forward-looking — grounded in facts already established in the speech.