Mass

Especially living in America, we are probably victims of general and every day persuasion.


One day, I was watching TV, unfortunately, and was watching the Super Bowl. Next thing you know you see the most intriguing and hilarious video generated by Burger King, which ultimately leads me to driving over there and buying that darn new burger. I am yet another victim of persuasion produced by the mass media. But persuasion isn't always that obvious. For example, in school, one person may convince another person to do more work simply cause the teacher seems to be critical of that one person's ideas. But that does not necessarily mean that person B should carry the burden, it just means person A should work on his or her ideas.

No matter where you look, particularly in today's society, advertisements, people on the streets, your friends and higher authorities, persuasion is unavoidable. And when we see these types of powers in the world, being the humans we are, we tend to listen to them. What can we do as people to finally be critical of these techniques? Be critical of what comes before you. If something seems to obvious and simple, or pushy and testing, ask yourself if this is really your independent idea? Did something else cause that thought to occur in your mind, or did you truly master the idea yourself?

Suicide

Our next speech, the actuative speech, is a kind of speech that allows us to help persuade the audience into believing a sort of idea that you may believe in. For my speech, I decided to go with the controversial topic of suicide. As far as paragraphs and ideas go, my main points will be dealing with the symptoms of suicide, for example depression, ways for the symptoms to be diagnosed in everyday situations, and lastly how the world would be if no one truly cared about those who are on the edge about life. Through Monroe's motivated sequence, I will be able to enhance my speech as to how the audience can interpret and visualize the information I will be presenting with. To begin, I am actually going to begin my speech with a true to life story that I had experienced personally. I am one person who suffered through depression, and am willing to open up about it to include credibility and emotional impact on my audience. Not only that, I am going to enter with frightening statistics and saddening ways that suicide have affected families. Then, in the body, I will go on to state the symptoms, and how to properly find them. Being a psychology major, reading some of the signs is simple, yet to an untrained person it may seem like nothing. After that, I will propose a situation/change that will need to be made in American society so that the symptoms and suicide itself can be avoided one person at a time. Lastly, visualization would be consisted of how to imagine yourself with the depressing symptoms and how it would be to live in a world where no one even notices or cares about how you are.

Chapter 14

One of the bigger things that I have learned from Chapter 14 was the speeches on questions of policy. The question of policy by definition is a course of action of how a certain problem should be addressed or solved. This is very interesting through the examples that the book provides us, such as "should consumers buy products made in the United States?" This makes us, the speech givers, realize that the perspective that speech allows us to present is very broad. Whether the question of policy is referring to a change in graffiti laws, or a change in government, it is a way to convince and persuade people into what you believe in. Sometimes through the idea of questioning the policy, government itself takes issues at hand and sees what the public may or may not feel about a certain topic. For example, the government might ask the public if they are happy with the way government is running the health care system, to see if any proper adjustments are required.

In the speech buddy video 10.1, one of the biggest things I learned was to make the audience much more interactive. Always use the words we, us, and I to make them feel like that you aren't just speaking to get a grade, but also to spark a relationship with your audience. This makes the audience much more interested in your presentation, and humor may even improve your speech. I think with both of the chapter 10 videos that speech videos present, the biggest idea is to incorporate the audience into your speech, whether it be shaping the outcome of the speech or even including them in short stories that you may have in your speech.

In chapter 12, the videos helped me to project my voice. One of my faults in presenting a speech, is that I fill my speech up with so much information, I am constantly speaking. With speech buddy, they helped me to realize this fault in which I am able to continue to improve my speech giving abilities. This includes vocal fillers, pauses and constant run ons. Enough practice can eliminate this, and I can reassure myself that with the valuable knowledge from these videos, I can continue to improve.

Chapter 12 Goodness

As with a lot of the information we read in the class, they are almost common knowledge, only that we as students never truly recognize it until the book places it in our lap. But one of the biggest things that I've noticed this year, and because of the book, is the reliance of a podium, table or object to cover half of our bodies. To be completely honest, I have to say that before this year began, most, if not all, my classes relied on hiding behind the podium, which would somehow decrease the awkwardness that presenting a speech may give. Ever since we had begun presenting in comm20, we were forced to not present behind a podium and rely on our words and slight actions to move our presentations along, not the act of hiding behind a podium. As far as being active during your speech, radiating positivity is probably the most vital thing to a speech. If one were to present a speech and not even be interested in what he or she were speaking about, it definitely shows that if the speaker is not interested in what he or she is speaking about, why should the audience care? I mostly have a problem with this not because I am never interested in my topic, but more because I need more practice to improve the confidence that is required with all speeches. One last idea from the reading that was very interesting was to involve the audience. Referring to other speakers from the room is probably one of the best examples to 1) show that you are an attentive listener, therefore possibly an effective speaker and 2) to show that people should pay attention to your speech as much as you paid to theirs. I never really do this, mainly because I focus on exactly what my speech has been practiced with but I am firmly going to practice in incorporating this into my next speech.

Flickr?

The discussion on Flickr has quickly captured my attention because you can see the war with words that people had. With a simple word such as "boy," I wasn't too aware of the fact that it could offend people. I actually thought it was a joke at first until someone put the word "boy" into context. It made me realize that sure it may be a part of racism, but to be honest, it is only that way if someone decides to interpret it in such a way. But banning every word as one person is offended by it, will eventually create a void of words to describe a person, whether it be "woman" or "boy" or even "person." Once you start the snowball, it will continue to grow, and people of all cultures, races, ethnicity, and gender will be offended by anything other than "it," even "it" is pretty offensive in itself. I see the world as incredibly sensitive beings, those that need to be taken care of constantly, with every word we say under surveillance. Kyudos says, "Flickr is not going to change the way people use English," which I believe is extremely true, with people trying to fight arguments online, people are never really taken seriously. Either way, relating it to the language given by our textbook, I feel that it is more of finding out whether or not to use a certain word in its context. Depending on the subject and idea that is being presented in either a speech or presentation, one should watch what he or she says, in efforts to please the audience.

Personal Evaluation

On April 3rd, 2009 my communications 40 class required us to present an informative speech on a topic of our choice. Initially, I wasn’t too sure as to what I was interested in doing, but I ended up choosing graffiti, a topic that I was more familiar with. After some preparation I then presented it in front of my fellow communications 40 class. In a nutshell, I felt that I did mildly better than I had done in the cultural artifact speech we had done a few months back, definitely still leaving room for improvement in all aspects.

To begin, I believe that the main purpose I was trying to portray through my speech was to show both sides of the war against graffiti and its relation to hip hop. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel too prepared for this presentation as much I was for my previous presentation. Reason being, I was caught up with midterms and such that week that practicing for me was almost out of the question. I managed to fit in about 2-3 hours of dedicated time to actually practicing my speech, but that did not compare to my 2-3 hours of practice for 3 days. So because of that, I saw myself looking at my note cards a little bit more than last time, as well as staring at the PowerPoint longer to have a guide. If I were able to retry my whole speech over again, one of the things I would change would be to refine the last few parts of my speech. As I’ve said, I vocally practice my speech until I get a whole structure with my PowerPoint down, and unfortunately was not able to fully accomplish this due to lack of time. Another part I would improve upon would be my research. Unfortunately, the amount of research I have done was not significant enough for me to inform people enough about my topic. It seemed as though my speech was mainly an opinion of graffiti, not more information.

Overall, the biggest thing I would have to look forward to changing would have to be my whole delivery set up. I simply was not prepared as much as I was for my first presentation and showed through my lack of eye contact. So what does this mean? I am going to practice for sure the following meeting, as well as increase my level enthusiasm to get the audience more into what I am actually saying. As far as content goes, I definitely needed more research towards my topic. I felt that as I was short on time, I simply put a lot of opinions and past knowledge into my topic without truly citing sources for things that I said. If I were to notice one of the biggest differences between my old speech and this one, first, the good would be that I improved slightly my voice projection, as well as my volume for confidence. Also, I think my presentation media was organized well enough for people to be intrigued. As far as what were bad, it would definitely be the lack of eye contact, the focusing of my PowerPoint slides and notes and lastly my lack of research. I eliminated most of my previous speech fillers, probably one of the more distracting things, but they could still use some work.

Unfortunately, as I’ve stated from before, I had limited eye contact and verbally spoken source citations. As far as eye contact goes, I would rate myself anywhere between 5-6, a step down from last time where my eye contact seemed to be top-notch. Based on my last performance, I would rate myself another B, only because there are other flaws that I still have yet to work on. But I think in order to gain credibility and trust from the audience, I need to prove that I have done my research more. I actually did have the source citations on my note card; I just was not fully able to implement them into my actual speech, which in turn hurt me. My performance overall was satisfactory to me, especially after watching the video. I feel I have completely developed over the years of public speaking training and seem to better prepare myself in one aspect or another. To be completely honest, I feel that this speech almost breaks even with my first speech because even though I managed to fix the problems that were around in the first speech, a brand new group of problems came afterward. Overall, this informative speech was pretty fun, being that it was a topic that I was extremely interested in, and is yet another assignment that will help me develop my speech techniques.

Five Friends.

Following our second speech, in informative form, we were required to integrate the lessons we learned from our mistakes into a second attempt, but this time in front of an audience of our choosing. So I decided to present my speech in front of my closest friends. They all go by the names Jennifer, Jessica, Addy, Raymond and Justin.

To begin, the speech that I had done in class, I feel was improved on a bit from my first speech. I felt that my delivery was one of the biggest improvements in terms of vocal delivery. I remember one of the biggest flaws, that I noticed myself was I was constantly using vocal fillers to fill in those "thinking gaps." So I decided to focus on that during my second speech. I saw drastic differences from the comments that people wrote on their evaluation papers, but I did notice a second thing that came up. The fact that I focused on the powerpoint slides too much seemed to be dominant. I believe this is because of the fact that because I tried to create these "thinking gaps," I wanted some sort of direction and comfort so that my speech would be flowing.

So I decided to implement the lesson learned from my mistake into my second speech. Fortunately I was able to improve upon my speech to where my friends didn't have too much to say against my presentation. I wasn't too sure if they didn't know exactly what to look for in terms of an informative speech and communications 20 went, but their minor gripes retained to by inability to stay still. Which surprised me because I never really had that problem in class where my motion would distract the audience. Other then that, it seemed to have gone well enough to merit a B+. I believe that the perfect presentation does not exist, but if I were to improve upon both of the informative speeches, I would have practiced much more. I wasn't as prepared this time around as I was for the first time which is why I felt uncomfortable with some of the words that I had to say.

What do I have to say about actually presenting in front of my friends? I felt it was a very different atmosphere being that I was at my friends' house, with people that I probably the most comfortable with. Being that all of our presentations are presented in a classroom with people that we aren't too familiar with, it does have a different impact on your speech. I feel that this assignment didn't necessarily implement new skills into my speech, but rather an understanding of how the settings differ and practicing under those different conditions can prove vital. Overall, this was a different experience, something that definitely will affect my speech ideas later on.

Chapter 11 Goodness

Chapter 11, as you all know, is all about how we can integrate presentation media. Most of the information provided and explained is general knowledge that many communications associated students are familiar with. What I never really thought about was about the simplicity of the types of presentation media. To begin, I never really thought about making a presentation myself with overhead transparencies, actual audience handouts, models and even real time web access. I always thought of a presentation media outlet as a simple, but well constructed powerpoint slide presentation. Fortunately for us, powerpoint can incorporate almost all aspects of presentation media, by displaying information by slides, being able to play movies, settings up pictures and customizable entrances.

I believe that in any speech or presentation, a powerpoint can prove useful, but shouldn't be the driving force in a presentation. I was at fault during my second speech my relying on my powerpoint a bit more than I should have. I believe that Chapter 11 also shows the significance of the presentation, by proving that it could create structure in the audience's mind, and by creating visuals in the audiences' minds to see what the speaker is talking about.