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.