Some years ago a college professor took a well-organized speech and scrambled it by randomly changing the order of its sentences. He then had a speaker deliver the original version to one group of listeners and the scrambled version to another group. After the speeches, he gave a test to see how well each group understood what they had heard. Not surprisingly, the group that heard the original, unscrambled presentation scored much higher than the other group.

A few years later, two professors repeated the same experiment at another school. But instead of testing how well the listeners understood each speech, they tested to see what effects the speeches had on the listeners’ attitudes toward the speakers. They found that people who heard the well-organized speech believed the speaker to be much more competent and trustworthy than did those who heard the scrambled speech. These are just two of many studies which have shown the value of organization and structure in a presentation or speech. You undoubtedly know from personal experience that you appreciate and learn more from hearing a well-organized talk compared to one that's poorly organized or contains no internal structure.

Organization is important for two other reasons, as well. First, structure is closely connected to critical thinking. When you try to organize your presentation, you gain practice in the general skill of establishing clear relationships among your ideas. Evidence also suggests that using a clear, specific method of organization can boost your confidence as a speaker and improve your ability to deliver a message fluently.

The second, and equally important reason for organizing a presentation is that you'll save your audience the trouble of doing it for you. If you make them work at listening to and organizing your thoughts, evidence and reasoning, they won't like it. Some, as you've seen, are highly motivated to learn what you're saying and will do the work necessary to make sense of it. Others won't even try and will just give up.

Presenters benefit from organizing a presentation, too. A message 22 that unfolds as an orderly sequence of points is easier to remember, and therefore, takes less time to rehearse. As a result, the presentation itself is easy to give.