For the final posting, please respond to the following prompts.  Remember to include your name clearly in your post.

• After watching your persuasive speech video and reviewing your previous videos, what sort of changes do you notice in your physical and vocal delivery over the course of these speeches?
• How successful do you think your persuasive speech was at winning over your audience?  Why?
• Having watched your classmates’ persuasive speeches, what do you think makes for a successful persuasive speech?
• How can you see yourself using skills from this class in the near or distant future?  What do you consider to be the most important skills you’ve taken away from the class?

Watch your group’s speech video and reflect on the informative speech:

• To what degree do you think your group organized and delivered a unified presentation?  What do you think you could have done differently to improve the cohesiveness of your presentation?
• How did you use visual aids?  What is one moment during which you think you used the visual particularly effectively?  What is one moment during which you think you could have used it more effectively?
• Comment on your own physical and vocal delivery.  How does it compare to your previous presentations in our class?  What are your goals in regards to delivery for the final speech of the semester?
• What qualities were the most influential in keeping your attention (or not) during your classmates’ presentations?

Blog posts should be between 250-400 words

In this post, reflect on what you have learned so far about public presentations through the monologue assignment and the personal speech assignment.

• What was different about your experience of presenting these two assignments (aside from the obvious difference that one was your own words and one was not)?
• Having watched the video of your personal speech, what new information did the video give you about how your speech went?  What were you satisfied with about your own presentation, and what would you like to improve?
• What qualities (related to both content and delivery) in your classmates’ personal speeches made you really want to listen?  What qualities made it hard to stay engaged?
• Include an image (photo or otherwise) somewhere in your post to reinforce one of your points.  Explain how this image relates to the point you’re making.

Our first round of posts will respond to your choice of the following prompts.  Blog posts should be between 250 and 400 words (longer isn’t always better!), and should include an image that relates to your writing.  

Option 1: Post an image (photographic or otherwise) that conveys a speech situation you have encountered in which you think a speaker has a powerful and positive impact on an audience or individual listener.  What is the nature of the speaker’s impact?  How does the speaker achieve this impact?  What does this image demonstrate about the nature of the relationship between audience and speaker?

Option 2: Describe a particular kind of situation in which you want to improve your communication skills, and post an image (photographic or otherwise) that reflects this situation.  It might be a community you’re involved in, a job, a class, etc.  What qualities of communication are valued in this context?  How would you describe your current communication style in this context?  What communication skills would you like to develop in this context?  What obstacles exist on the path toward achieving this communication style?

We’ll use this site to share thoughts and experiences related to public speaking and the power of effective communication over the course of the semester.

You can find important documents for the course under the tab “course documents” above.

I look forward to our semester together!