ABSTRACT
About 1600 years ago, St. Augustine identified three purposes for speaking publicly: to teach, to please, and to move. In succeeding centuries the purposes were described as: to enlighten the understanding, to please the imagination, to move the passions, and to influence the will. And further along in the evolution of speech theory and instruction, the outcomes were described as: to inform, to entertain, to stimulate through emotion and to convince through reasoning.1 At present, communication theorists generally agree there are two purposes: to inform and to persuade. Some add to entertain as a classification. For our discussion we will only discuss to inform and to persuade as the entertaining speech follows the same concepts as an informative speech.
