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.