Over the course, I have noticed that now I do use less vocal fillers now. I am also louder and I try to use more hand gestures now. My eye contact level has stayed the same, I think I was able to efficiently maintain eye contact with the audience. However, I still believe that I need to work on my stance. I still do a weird sway from side to side and I think this makes me look less confident. I think i was able to show emotions in my speeches and maintain volume and pitch throughout the course. Since this is a controversial speech, and I said many things to provoke the emotions of the audience, I believe that I was able to win over the audience.  I think a successful persuasive speech needs to use a little bit of everything so logos pathos and ethos. It should be straight to the point. It should be able to provoke the audience’s thought and emotions. I definitely think that I will be able to use these tactics in the future. I plan on going into the business field where you’ll definitely have to persuade your ideas to an audience at least one point in your career if not even more. The most important skills I have learned is to be able to really maintain eye contact which I never did. I also learned how to give off a more confident demeanor through your stance. Ive learned a lot of things from this class and i definitely will be using them in the future.

I believe my group did an excellent job in creating a unified presentation. We were able to make it cohesive by sharing the conclusion and introduction. Maybe to make it more cohesive we could have  made better transitions. We did have transitions but I don’t think we were clear and concise enough with them. For our presentation, we used the photographs from our photography exhibitions. We talked about the conditions of the poor back then verses now and we used these photos to depict these conditions. One point where I think we used visual aids in a good way was when Valerie was talking about child labor and she was showing the pictures that showed child labor while explaining the photos. At one point when we were explaining the Zoe Strauss exhibition we had the pictures up on the screen but we were not explaining them. I think we should have explained the pictures more thoroughly. I like how I was not too dependent on my index cards and I was able to maintain eye contact with the audience even when explaining the pictures. However, I feel like I should have used more hand gestures, I was too still. I also think I should have “owned the space” more and make my stance stronger. In my previous speech I swayed too much and I think I did a good job in minimizing that. For my last speech I want to use more hand gestures and have a stronger pose. I think the attention getter is the most crucial part in grabbing my attention. I also liked it when people did not overly explain their topic and they kept it short and straight to the point. If a person ended up talking for too long I ended up losing focus.

After watching the recorded video of my personal speech, I thought there were many things I could improve on. First, is my posture, I thought my posture could’ve been firmer and I could have “owned” the space. I also think I should’ve used more hand gestures. From time to time, I would sway back and forth which seemed like a distraction. I mostly believe I could’ve done better with my physical delivery. However, I did like the inflection in my voice and my use of emotions. I also maintained a lot of eye contact with the audience. I think this speech was harder than the monologue. Memorizing the monologue was easy and it was fun because you were acting as someone else. This speech wasn’t hard because it’s your own specific experience. The only difficult part I found was putting your experience in order and then maintaining that order throughout the speech. When you usually talk about your personal experience to someone else you never really say it in a orderly fashion. In my fellow classmates’ speeches, I think the first sentence was what really grabbed me. If their attention getter was good, it automatically wanted me to continue paying attention. If they had very good vocal variety and they made use of their emotions it also drew me in. It was difficult to pay attention to someone who talked very slow or talked about one specific thing for a long time. But it was also difficult to understand people who were talking fast. Otherwise, I really think everyone in the class did a really good job. A lot of them weren’t too dependent on their notes which I found very impressing. The image I attached shows a man giving a speech, but his physical delivery is very good. Even though he stands behind a podium, he uses hand gestures.

Salma Haque 

Salma Haque

Honestly speaking, I usually give speeches for myself. And no, I don’t mean literally looking in the mirror and actually giving a speech to myself. I mean throughout high school, whenever I had to deliver a speech in school, I never actually did it to inform, persuade, entertain or whatever the case may be. I did it for the grade. It did not matter if the class would never relate to what I’m talking about, as long as I delivered it and got it over with, I was totally fine. That’s something I really want to change. In a classroom, you need to be able to interact with your peers, have them connect to what you’re saying, make eye contact, sound enthusiastic and establish a sense of confidence and credibility, use and appropriate level of language; none of which I actually did. I would always stare down at a

piece of paper and read my speech of that. The class would get bored and because I never mingled with them they chose not to listen to me. My voice was as monotone as it could possibly be and I did not sound like I really wanted to convey a message to them. This did not only apply to speeches but even class presentations. I want to be able to actually get my audience engaged, and get a response for them. I know not reading off a paper, improvising and memorizing will be tough. Even sounding confident and passionate will be a struggle but I want to be able to overcome that.  In the future when I have to give a presentation for a reputable company and this presentation can either make it or break it for me, I really don’t want to be reading off a piece of paper. Hopefully, Speech Communications will help me overcome these obstacles and better prepare me for and out of the classroom.