Consider your audience before writing your speech.

It's a good idea to assume they know little about your topic. (Which is why you’re informing them, right?) With this in mind, however, you might still need to give background information. Be careful about what shortcuts you take in explaining your topic.

Unless your assignment says otherwise, don’t explain anything that’s a given for your audience. Nobody wants to be told what a car steering wheel or a zipper is, after all, and if you're giving a speech on carburetors to, say, a group of auto mechanics, you won’t need to give a lot of background information because they already know the topic well.

3. Give an informative speech on “How traditional marriages have changed since the 60's”

Pundits and politicians love to pontificate about strengthening traditional marriage. But as someone who has studied marriage forms and family life for more than three decades, I wonder how many of them have the faintest idea of what they're talking about.

I suppose they mean the " traditional" marriage of one man and one woman.

But through most of human history and in most cultures the most widely accepted tradition of marriage has been polygamy -- one man and multiple women. We're not just talking about exotic island cultures or lost tribes in the African jungle. Polygamy is the family form most often mentioned in the first five books of the Old Testament.

In some societies, traditional marriage meant one woman wedded to several men. In others, a woman could take another woman as a " female husband." In China and the Sudan, when two sets of parents wanted to forge closer family ties and no live spouse was available, one set sometimes married off a child to the " ghost" of a dead son or daughter of the other family. Among the Bella Coola and Kwakiutl native societies of the Pacific Northwest, two families who wished to become in-laws but didn't have two sets of marriageable children available for a match might even draw up a marriage contract between a son or daughter and a dog belonging to the desired in-laws. Most traditional marriages were concerned with property and wealth, not love or sex.

But what about the sanctity of marriage in the Christian tradition? It is true that Jesus, contradicting Moses, forbade his followers to divorce. But Jesus was not very keen on having them marry in the first place, holding that it was better to abandon worldly ties and dedicate oneself to building the faith. " If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple" (Luke, 14). The Apostle Paul thought that getting married was better than burning in hell for unmarried fornication, but that the truly good thing was to remain a virgin and devote oneself to spreading God's word.

For the first 16 centuries of its existence, the Catholic Church held that marriage was inherently tainted by what Pope Gregory the Great deemed the degrading " carnal pleasure" that took place under its auspices. In the church's hierarchy of worthy females, the virgin ranked highest, the widow second and the wife a distant third.

Nor did the early church establish elaborate rules about what made a marriage legitimate. One pope proposed that a marriage ought to take place in church to be valid. But his bishops pointed out that such a change would immediately render most of Europe's children illegitimate. So the church decided that a man and woman were married if they had exchanged " words of consent, " even if they had done so out by the haystack, without any witnesses or involvement by a priest.

Not until 1215 did the Catholic Church make marriage a sacrament, and not until 1563 did it begin to enforce rules mandating that certain ceremonies had to be performed to make a marriage legitimate.

Sixteenth-century Protestant reformers had a much more positive attitude toward the blessedness of marriage than Catholics. But Protestant clerics were stricter than Catholics in enforcing the tradition that marriage should be governed by considerations of patriarchal authority and property rather than free choice based on love. In many Protestant regions, authorities forbade impoverished individuals from marrying at all. And Protestant officials often stepped in to dissolve marriages that had been made without parental consent, even if both parties were adults and children had already been born to their union.

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