Richard's Blog

oh no.

2006-02-28T21:19:00.000-08:00

There was a lot of improvement all from everyone on this round of speeches. All three speakers delivered their speeches with more confidence and clarity than previously. Colleen’s speech on Dadaism was pretty fun stuff. The attention getter worked very well and while I was familiar with the movement as a visual one, it was nice to look at some of the writings. Beckie’s was showed much more confidence and gave a much more cohesive and organized speech. Her video didn’t work out so well, but she kept things going smoothly. Sonia had some neat visuals to go along with the subliminal messaging scandal in the 50s, particularly the second one that went beyond what I traditionally think of subliminal messaging to be. Hopefully, I can pull through on my next try.

hey!

2006-02-27T08:46:00.000-08:00

I’m getting ready for speech number two and I hoping to improve from the last one. Unfortunately, my last one wasn’t well received and I really need to improve. Again, I am speaking on a topic that I am comfortable talking about but this time it is much more concrete and I don’t need to try to explain something as abstract as why I think human beings are uncomfortable with being flesh and blood. So as far as fixing the conclusion goes, I need to work on it, but this time around I think it will be easier.
For rhetorical strategy, I need to explain what is important (to some degree) and what is so interesting about my topic. Also, I lost the most points on my speech on delivery which was discouraging as I thought I did a better job of hiding how uncomfortable I was. I think that the video stills I plan on showing will help very much in condensing what is in the videos to create a virtual experience. Regardless, I think I’ve got a neat topic, or at least a different one, and potentially I can do something interesting and better than the last one.

First Speech

2006-02-15T09:18:00.000-08:00

My first speech went much better than I expected, but it certainly wasn’t too great either. Firstly, I felt more comfortable that I thought I would speaking and this is probably due to the class size. Also, this is an experience that I’ve recounted many times before in the company of friends. I repressed a lot of the fidgeting I tend to do that for an audience, I’m sure, becomes distracting.
Like I was told during peer critique, I need to work harder on good eye contact and a more concrete delivery. The end, where I think I was least successful with this, happened to be the part of the speech where I spent the most time preparing and practicing how I was going to make my point. Ideally, I would have liked to have been as brief as possible with the summary at the end, but I thought the concept I was trying to get across was too abstract that it risked being to ambiguous. Unfortunately, I left my outline trying to clarify my point and ended up sounding redundant. Similarly, I overcompensated for time. When I went through what I was going to say in preparation I was ending up short and was worried that my speech was going to be too short. During my delivery, I was trying to stretch it out and ended up seven plus minutes. I think my condensing my ideas, I would have had a much more effective speech.

Here It Goes:

2006-01-23T10:21:00.000-08:00

Hi, I'm Richard and I'm a film major. I don't really have a knack for verbal communication to begin with and my friends describe me as socially awkward. I was pretty uncertain how I would manage in a public speaking class but decided that it sure couldn't hurt. Honestly, I am hoping to improve in this any way I can because I've realized that as much as I hate public speaking, more confidence in formal speaking is something that would really be a useful asset to me.