126 Good Informative Speech Topics – 2024
June 23, 2024
What is an informative speech? You may be asking this question if you find yourself needing to give one for a class or extracurricular. Unlike a persuasive speech, which is designed to convince an audience of something, or a debate, which can be polemic by nature, an informative speech is meant to educate its listeners on a topic, elucidate an unclear idea, or simply help an audience delve more deeply into a subject. In other words, while informative speeches can persuade or argue, they don’t have to. In this article, we’ll highlight a few tips on how to choose good informative speech topics, and then provide a list of 126 informative speech ideas to get you brainstorming for your next big speech!
How to Choose Informative Speech Topics
Your choice of informative speech topic will depend greatly upon the task at hand: is this speech for a class? A passion project? A campus rally? A professional development conference? Recruiting for a particular major, club, or community service organization? A high school speech competition? Once you know the purpose and parameters of your speech, it will be easier to select an informative speech topic that is an appropriate subject and size. Additionally, it’s important to consider your audience, expertise, scope, research, and tone before you delve into your writing.
Audience
Knowing your target audience is key to creating reciprocity, or the necessary give and take between speaker and listener that creates communication and understanding. Speakers who know their audiences are better able to shape their speeches to be well-received.[i] Imagine, for example, you’re giving an informative speech on “Jane Austen’s narrators.” You must ask yourself: are you giving your speech to a panel of scholars, to educated adult non-experts, or to grade school-aged children? If your audience will be comprised of literature professors, your speech should provide fairly advanced and in-depth knowledge and should be filled with the latest developments in professional literary criticism. If your audience is made up of grade school-aged children, you’ll want to start with the basics, like who was Jane Austen? And what, exactly, is a narrator?
Expertise
As you give your informative speech, you’ll want to think about not only your audience’s level of expertise in your speech topic, but also your own (and it’s okay if you’re a novice in the subject!).[ii] An informative speech often includes or takes into consideration a synthesis of preexisting scholarship in a field or information around a topic. While you don’t need to apprise your audience of an entire body of research before you begin delivering your speech, you do want to have a working knowledge of the preexisting conversation around your informative speech topic.[iii] This will inform the level of research you’ll need to perform before you begin writing your speech.
Research
In terms of selecting research sources, it’s good to remember the three P’s: peer-reviewed, published, and prestigious. A peer-reviewed source is one that has been evaluated by a group of experts in the field of the writer. It has undergone the most stringent editing and fact-checking and, when first published, is the most up-to-date information in a field. A published source is one that has also usually undergone some editing before publication – though you’ll want to be wary of self-published sources and online publications (these usually don’t receive the same kind of scrutiny as printed texts).
Finally, it’s certainly okay to use online sources, but you want to make sure they are coming from a prestigious or at least well-known source like a national newspaper or even an established commercial website. A good tip for assessing a source’s quality is to check: does this source cite any outside resources in a works cited or in footnotes?
Scope
You want to be sure that you are able to cover a topic thoroughly, given the time and resources allotted. For example, if you have five minutes to give an informative speech to your psychology 101 classmates, you could choose a general topic like, “Why was Sigmund Freud important to psychology?” If you have an hour to give an informative speech at a professional psychology conference, you might provide a detailed account of Sigmund Freud’s most important contributions to a particular branch of modern psychology and explain its current significance to the field, including recent developments in research and clinical practice.
Tone
Finally, something crucial to consider is the emotional register of your speech. Is the subject matter something serious like an illness or climate change? Or is it a politically charged topic like immigration or gun control? Is it light, like “how to make pizza dough” or “the invention of the roller coaster?” Or is it merely intriguing or educating like, “personality typing and psychology,” “owning a poodle,” or “Ben Franklin’s top five aphorisms?” Gauging the emotional involvement of your audience will help you choose an appropriate informative speech topic for the project at hand and will ultimately let you craft a more effective speech.
The 126 informative speech ideas below run the gamut from broad to very specific and can all serve as starting points as you brainstorm what you’d like to give a speech on. Good luck!
Health & Medicine Informative Speech Topics
1) Ideas on curbing the spread of future global pandemics.
2) What is the endocrine system?
3) What is a physician’s assistant?
4) The importance of blood donation.
5) Disparities in healthcare between different demographic groups.
6) How did Marie Curie contribute to the medical field?
7) What is the role of nurses in primary care settings?
8) What subspecialties are there in women’s health?
9) What recent developments have been made in knee replacement surgery techniques?
Good Informative Speech Topics/Informative Speech Ideas (Continued)
10) What is Traditional Chinese Medicine?
11) Telehealth and patient outcomes in recent years.
12) How to MRI machines work?
13) Comparing healthcare systems in different countries.
14) The five most important cancer research innovations in the past five years.
15) What is a plague?
16) How does social media affect mental health?
17) What is the World Health Organization?
18) What are the differences between a midwife and an obstetrician?
STEM Informative Speech Topics
19) What are some important differences between commercial and government-sponsored space flight programs?
20) How do rollercoasters work?
21) The relationship between AI and defense.
22) How are robots used in surgeries?
23) How do you solve a quadratic equation?
24) Why are information systems an important part of modern marketing?
25) What recent innovations have been made in the field of machine learning algorithms?
26) How has cloud computing changed in the past five years?
27) What is the role of engineers in mining and extraction?
Good Informative Speech Topics/Informative Speech Ideas (Continued)
28) What is a black hole?
29) What is internal combustion?
30) How self-driving cars work.
31) What are some differences between aeronautical and aerospace engineers?
32) What is Euclidian geometry?
33) How is probability be used in sport management?
34) Why are we running out of helium?
35) What is the relationship between cybersecurity and national politics?
36) The most important uses of 3D printing?
Arts & Humanities Informative Speech Topics
37) What are the most likely interpretations of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be?” speech?
38) What was the Dadaism movement?
39) Why is the Mona Lisa so popular?
40) The differences between highbrow, lowbrow, and commercial cultural production.
41) What are the major tenets of postmodernism?
42) The influences of Alfred Hitchcock on modern cinema.
43) What is the difference between “performance” and “performativity?”
44) What are the differences between an early novel and a romance?
Good Informative Speech Topics/Informative Speech Ideas (Continued)
45) Recent developments in literature and ecocriticism.
46) What is the debate on the Elgin Marbles?
47) In what ways was fashion an important element of the Belle Epoch era?
48) The top five most influential texts in speculative fiction.
49) What is pop art?
50) Who was Andy Warhol?
51) What is The Iliad?
52) Postcolonial studies as an academic field.
53) The history of the Louvre museum.
54) Jane Austen’s narrators and free indirect discourse.
Psychology and Sociology Informative Speech Topics
55) What is the Enneagram and how is it used in therapeutic settings?
56) How did Pierre Bourdieu define “fields?”
57) What is the Panopticon?
58) What is intersectionality?
59) The role of psychologists in school settings.
60) How is behavior psychology related to consumerism and marketing?
61) What is gentrification?
62) The role of the pharmaceutical industry in psychiatric treatment.
63) Who was Sigmund Freud and why is he important?
64) What is the difference between clinical and research psychology?
Good Informative Speech Topics/Informative Speech Ideas (Continued)
65) What is the relationship between social media and mental health?
66) What is neuropsychology?
67) What is an ethnographic study?
68) How did Habermas define the public sphere?
69) What is multiple personality disorder?
70) What is are the “gaze” and the “mirror stage,” according to Lacan?
71) Describe the prisoner’s dilemma.
72) What is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?
Nature and Environment Informative Speech Topics
73) What are some pros and cons of wind farming?
74) Why are microbiomes important for health?
75) What is an axolotl?
76) Death Valley: the hottest place on Earth
77) What threats do spotted lanternflies pose?
78) What are the most significant climate change “points of no return?”
79) Water conservation strategies in the American West.
80) What is biodiversity?
81) How do dolphins communicate?
Good Informative Speech Topics/Informative Speech Ideas (Continued)
82) Why was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring significant for the environmentalist movement?
83) How was the Santorini caldera created?
84) What are plate tectonics?
85) How and why tornadoes happen.
86) What is the El Niño phenomenon and why is it important?
87) Fungus and blue spruce disease in Northeast Ohio.
88) What measures are being taken to curb deforestation in the Amazon?
89) How is the Galapagos ecosystem preserved today?
90) Floridian ecosystems and the Red Tide.
Business, Marketing, Finance and Economy
91) The role of sports merchandising in U.S. women’s Olympic events.
92) Subprime mortgages and the housing market crash of 2008.
93) What are the eight best steps you can take to better your personal finances?
94) Which social media platforms are most lucrative for marketing to each current online generation?
95) What is inflation?
96) What is the relationship between politics and the unemployment rate?
97) What is market saturation?
98) How do we measure the GDP of emergent nations?
Good Informative Speech Topics/Informative Speech Ideas (Continued)
99) What developments to we expect to see in the industry competition between EVs and regular automobiles?
100) What is an index fund? What is a mutual fund?
101) Bond holdings late in retirement.
102) The role of social justice in branding.
103) How does search engine optimization work for marketing?
104) Is the influencer economy a bubble?
105) Describe the differences between a CFA and a CPA.
106) What developments have we seen in start-up economies in the past five years?
107) What is embezzlement?
108) What is the history of human resource departments?
History and Travel
109) The religious persuasions of each of Henry VIII’s wives.
110) How the aqueduct system worked in ancient Rome
111) What are the tallest buildings in the world?
112) What was the Black Death?
113) The Watergate Scandal.
114) In what ways was the printing press an important invention?
115) What is the Chernobyl site like today?
Good Informative Speech Topics/Informative Speech Ideas (Continued)
116) What was the relationship between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla?
117) Why was the Great Wall of China built?
118) Who were medieval anchorites?
119) The political significance of whistle-stop train tours.
120) What was the significance of the Second Boer War?
121) The Tennis Court Oath.
122) What are the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World?
123) Witch hunting in 1600s New England.
124) What was the Space Race?
125) Why are the bodies of Pompeiians preserved?
126) What is Machu Picchu?
Good Informative Speech Topics – Works Cited
[i] Lloyd-Hughes, Sarah. How to Be Brilliant at Public Speaking: Any Audience, Any Situation. Pearson Educated Limited, Edinburgh 2011.
[ii] Downs, Douglas and Elizabeth Wardle. “What Can a Novice Contribute? Undergraduate Researchers in First-Year Composition,” Undergraduate Research in English Studies (2010) pp. 173-90).
[iii] Graff, Gerard, and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2006.
Informative Speech Ideas – Additional Reading
