Personal Narrative: Improving Public Speaking Skills

“There are only two types of speakers in the world. 1. The nervous and 2. Liars.”. These words, spoken by the great author Mark Twain, have developed an incredible amount of meaning to me over the past several months. Since I have started COM 110, I have developed as a speaker, student, and citizen more than I ever could’ve predicted.. As I stated in my CIP paper, I entered this class with three major goals. I aimed to become more prepared for graduate school and job interviews, improve my critical thinking skills, and improve my group communication skills. I accomplished all three of these goals, and gained a lot of knowledge along the way. While I did accomplish the goals that I set at the beginning of the semester, I believe that some of …show more content…
As Mark Twain said, anyone who claims to not be nervous about public speaking is likely lying. I think that being able to control your apprehension is the key to unlocking your true public speaking abilities, but this apprehension should always be present. As an athlete in high school, it did not take me long to learn that the nervousness and jitters I felt before a game were the driving force that caused me to perform to the best of my ability. These feelings caused me to prepare as much as possible for the game ahead of me and not lose focus. This is very similar to the importance of the apprehension I felt before speaking. My apprehension caused me to prepare for my speech days before I would have prepared for any other assignment. I believe that when a person loses this feeling, in sports or in public speaking, they have lost their desire to truly succeed. This improvement was perhaps the most obvious to me. My first speech was without a doubt the speech I was most apprehensive about. This speech ended up being my best individual score. On the other hand, I was less apprehensive about my second speech and prepared less for it. My lower score on this speech directly reflected this. After the second speech, I recognized that I would have to work harder to receive the grade I wanted, and my apprehension started to appear again, but this time I …show more content…
At the beginning of the semester, my goals related mostly to my future academic and career goals. After learning more about the value of communication, my goals changed to more “big picture” goals relating to the relationships I build throughout my life. While I did accomplish many of the goals that I set at the beginning of the semester, there are several that are still in progress, and several that I will never complete. My most important goal entering this class was to eliminate my public speaking apprehension altogether. I knew that this was a lofty goal, but over the course of the semester I began to realize that I could not and did not want to accomplish it. I realized the value of my apprehension and began to appreciate