The Ultimate Gift Speech Analysis

In her speech, The Ultimate Gift, Jennifer Conrad attempts to use Monroe’s Motivational Sequence in her speech to convince her classmates to donate blood regularly. She utilizes statistics and an anecdote to bring her point home. She provides the students with a clear way for them to help. Unfortunately, her condescending tone, lack of sensitivity towards a diverse audience, and lack of source citations reduced the effectiveness of her speech Overall I would not consider Ms. Conrad’s delivery effective. Although she had great eye contact and maintained a good volume of her voice throughout the speech she failed to use any gestures. Her voice and tone didn't change throughout the speech causing her to come across and very sterile. She did …show more content…
Conrad used several word choices that were not sensitive to her audience. She consistently told her audience to “see” things and how they should just “look.” These word choices show a lack of sensitivity towards a diverse audience which may include some people who are visually impaired. In addition, her word choices added the too feeling that she was condescending and negative towards her audience. For example, she did not encourage her audience to donate blood, she reprimanded them for not being regular donors. Another example is that instead of reassuring her audience that needles are not so bad, she dismissed the possible fear as insignificant and petty. Ms. Conrad’s anecdote of a small girl, with blonde hair and blue eyes shows an integral lack of sensitivity to the diverse audience of a classroom. All people on earth deserve to get blood when they are sick; it is not limited to a certain group with specific characteristics. This particular set of characteristics is particularly insensitive to those who are familiar with Nazi Germany and the holocaust, as millions of people have lost family members because their skin was not white and their hair not blonde. On the other hand, Ms. Conrad had great transitions; it was very clear when she was moving on to different sections of her speech through the use of keywords. She could have improved her verbal delivery by choosing words that were sensitive to all of her audience like “imagine” and …show more content…
Conrad used several support materials including an anecdote and several statistics. The anecdote that she used talked about a child and likely was used to elicit emotions from the audience. In my opinion using an anecdote about a child was effective, but she should not have dwelled on this specific story throughout the entire speech. While it is important to give blood to this child, the speaker made it seem like this child deserved blood more than other people which reduced the effectiveness of the speech overall. In addition, the many statistics the speaker quoted were not specifically cited. This reduced her credibility tremendously. It was fairly difficult to find exactly which part of the American Red Cross's website the speaker was referencing. When I found the webpage I saw that some of the information she reported was not correct, for example she said that the blood is split into three parts but really it is split into four. In order to achieve more credibility and accuracy the speaker should have used for specific source citations, for example on the American Red Cross's website in their Blood Facts and Statistics section. Her other source was equally as vague. When I looked up their website on the internet I was not able to find the information she cited because I was not told where exactly on the website it was supposed to be found. There are many credible websites to use to report facts about blood donations including givingblood.org and bloodsource.org, the