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.