The biggest thing that I will take from this class would be how to prepare myself and how to recognize my mistakes in the things that I do. As I have mentioned in my previous post, learning how to prepare for my speech and manage my time are the biggest concepts that I had developed throughout the semester. From that, I can see myself better preparing for things, almost anything in my educational and career futures. If I were to ever have any presentation, particularly those that relate to my major, I am able to see what expectations from a speech are, and what I can do to hopefully influence everyone to believe what I say.

Concepts

Probably the biggest difference and concept that communications 20 has helped me to develop was time management and speech preparedness. I had taken a communications 40 class prior to this class, but was more focused on the arguments and rebuttal rather than my actual presentation. Especially after the first speech, I better prepared myself for the following speeches to allow a more fluent speech with less word fillers and more eye contact so that overall the things I did were extremely effective. I learned also how to incorporate narrations, stories, personal experiences and how to have an effective introduction. Up until this class, I had always kept my speeches to improvisational needs, mostly because that was what I was experienced in. The problem with that, which I quickly learned, was that improvising is really good for shows, jokes and action, but in speeches where you are required to be informative and credible, it just isn't enough. So with that, time management, speech preparedness and research were all concepts and ideas that I had developed to further improve my overall speech presentations.

Self-Evaluation 3

On April 8th, 2009 my communications 20 class required us to present a persuasive/actuative speech that involved a big issue that concerned society. For my topic, I had decided to talk about a controversial issue, suicide. The reason I had chosen this topic was because it was something I could kind of relate to, being that I had experience with depression, and that it pertains to my major. Overall, the speech was a good experience, though I can say personally that it doesn’t compare to that of what I had done before in the class, my informative speech. Following the informative speech, I presented suicide as a threat and wanted to address solutions, but I felt that there were trade-offs in terms of what was being followed and what I made mistakes on.

As far as getting the job done with my speech, I think that I had done an effective job in doing so. The biggest thing that I decided to include in the persuasive speech was my experience not with suicide, but with one of the biggest contributors to suicide which was depression. With that, I enabled myself to talk about my life experiences and attain more credibility throughout my speech. This went on further as I discussed what helped me in my depression stages, and allowed the audience to know what was expected out of depressed people. Emotional narratives helped me in the deliverance of my speech, but also the way I worded things, to where it was almost like an epidemic. Besides that, I felt that my speech had major room for improvement.

To be completely honest, I was had little to no confidence WHILE I was speaking. For some reason, prior to going up, I wasn’t nervous at all and was very confident but as soon as I hit F5 to begin my slideshow, fear struck and wouldn’t stop impeding on my overall performance. I felt my voice shaking from time to time, my memory being lost at every pause, and my overall posture not as perfect as I wish it were. With that in mind, I think it could easily be traced to my lack of preparedness in terms of organization. Admittedly, I felt the strain of finals falling upon me and ended up focusing on the other classes’ finals rather than my speech, and was obviously affected. From my old speech, I saw that my ability to cite sources was at least noticeable, both on my slideshow as well as verbally. Comparing this to my other speeches, I did terribly in terms of citing my sources. But in my other speeches, I obviously had a bit more organization and structure even though there may have been fewer citations. Comparing it to my first speech, they were slightly similar, only my first speech had confidence and speed, a couple of things that I obviously lacked in my final speech. One thing that came back from my first speech was my speech fillers. With improvisation, I always tend to blurt random “Uhs..” here and there to give me a split second to digest what my next few words are. Unfortunately, it wasn’t an improvement from my last speech because I actually eliminated the speech fillers in my second speech as I had learned from my first speech.

My eye contact on the other hand, was considerably better compared to my second speech. I would rate my eye contact an 8, because like I said, no matter how hard and perfect a speech may be, there will always be room for improvement. In the end, I would give myself a B-, mostly because I saw a decrease in performance when I believed that there should have been improvement. True, I did manage to improve some parts of my speech-giving abilities, but I felt that an overall improvement was what I was looking for. For example, I gave better source citations and research, but unfortunately came back with speech fillers and gaps in my speech. I would improve the use of vocal fillers, my preparation once again, and more on my research. Even though I felt I gave an adequate amount of research, I felt that my topic depended mostly on statistics and personal opinions in terms of persuasion. I only verbally cited one source, even though I had more on my note card, probably due to my lack of preparation. As I’ve said, I believe that this speech was a minor improvement over my last speech, with both mistakes and improvements that carried over and old ones.

In the end, I still think that my second presentation/speech was possibly one of the best I have done this semester, mostly because I felt I was more prepared and able to give a presentable informative speech. Otherwise, Monroe’s Motivated Sequence was one of the best structures that I have heard of in terms of speech persuasion, and I felt that I could carry on the knowledge of this idea over to real-life situations.

Favorite Speech

In class we were required to present three speeches, cultural artifact, informative as well a persuasive or actuative speech. These speeches altogether were a good experience, but if I had to choose one, my favorite speech would have to be the one about graffiti, but informative speech. I love being able to present about things that I am more passionate about, particularly those things that are associated with hip hop. Every year, in every class that requires a speech, if we are able to choose our topic, mine always would pertain to the media, hip hop culture or music in general.

And not only did the content reflect how I did, but I felt that the informative speech about graffiti had to be my most prepared, as far as I feel. I made sure that I had dedicated time to practice it as much as I needed, and with passion in the culture, it only helped to fuel me to work harder. Continuing on, I have always felt that speeches were a downside to my communications skills, but with enough passion in any subject, one, including myself, can produce a speech that is exceptional.

Speech Budday

The speech buddy videos started with how to identify the elements of argument. The following is as listed, thesis, claim, evidence and reasoning are all elements of a successful argument. With a clear thesis, the audience is able to prepare for anything that you are about to say, in the logical and chronicle order that you stated. I believe the strongest part of the arguments are evidence and claim. In order for the harder truth, one must do professional research from credible sources to have a claim to even be valid.

The first video intro'd with a question that allowed the audience to listen and answer accordingly to see that she was diving deeper into their ideas. Homeschooling was introduced as a safe and protected area for those who are exposed to violence that is experienced in public schools. This may seem a little pathos and a little mythos from our reading. Another is an appeal to the audience's past experience of how 8 straight hours of school actually affects how they feel about school. From the benefits of homeschool, one can spread it out in a comfortable pace. A lot of her arguments pertained to experience, opinion and ideas. The video that was against homeschool started off with more ideas and concrete views to allow the audience to focus to more facts that come after. Parents vs. Teachers is an argument that seems almost factual, that some teachers have gone to school to actually teach as opposed to a parent who might have learned from home.

Chapter 15 Goodness

Chapter 15 dives into an explanation of how deductive reasoning can help influence the outcome of your speech. What I learned from this section was that it was not only essential to include a major premise, minor premise and a conclusion, but also to integrate it so that the topic and general purpose do not interfere with how the rest of the speech and/or paper goes. If one can successfully integrate some deductive reasoning into his or her paper, he or she will have a very big impact on the audience and create a stronger essay. Every component, particularly in our upcoming actuative speech, is vital, especially with those parts that concern swaying the ideas of your audience. Chapter 15 also described inductive reasoning which I believe is also vital in contributing to a speeches idea. Supporting a claim by example, I believe, is one of the strongest things you can do to put an image in the audiences' mind.

Posts

There are a whole load of times when I attempted to persuade my fellow peers into believing a sort of idea that I had believed in. One of the biggest topics that I tend to be very defensive about is the whole media and the image of hip hop in society. During the second semester freshman year, we were required to write and prepare a speech and paper to persuade the audience into one belief. I am very defensive when people start to criticize hip hop and generalize the form of music as gangster, low life and for black people. I used research and experience of hip hop as my type of reasoning to allow the audience to believe what I had to say. Understandably, I had to put up with peoples' ideas and open up my mind to their perspectives, but I took them into account and implemented them into my sorts of reasoning. I eventually explained the way media infects our mind with their own sort of perspective, and played a song commonly played on the radio and compared it to a song that no one has heard but is considered "real hip hop."