Until taking this speech class, I had no idea how much time and effort great speakers put into their speeches. They must be able to immediately grab their audience’s attention, they must be able to make what they are saying exciting and worth knowing, and they must also deliver their speech in a unique way, so that they can continue to keep the audience’s attention throughout the duration of the speech. Until I sat down and critiqued my speech and realized that even though I thought I was very well prepared for this speech, there were aspects of my speech that were not delivered as effectively as they could have been, but there were other aspects of my speech that I thought went very smoothly and made me sound like a credible and interesting
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For example, while giving my speech, I made a conscious effort to make sure that I was fluctuating my voice as much as possible because I did not want to have a monotone voice. However, I noticed that towards the end of my speech, I started to sound less enthusiastic about my topic, which made the pitch of my voice go down, making the last two points of my speech very boring. The rate at which I gave my speech was nearly perfect at the beginning and I believe that this was the case because I knew what I was going to say and did not have to refer to my notes that often. But when I reached the part about the kinesthetic learner, I began to slow down and refer to my notes many more times than I had done previously. In doing so, my speech became choppier and you could tell that I was not as well informed about the last two learners, as I was about the first two learners. The amount of pauses in my speech are very distracting. For example when talking about reading/writing learners, I say the following: *looking at my notes with a two second pause* “um” …show more content…
I thought that this would be the case with my speech, yet I was very surprised to find that yes I moved my hands almost constantly, but that they did not seem to be that distracting to the audience. The only reason that I believe that I did not move my hands in dramatic motions like I usually would when explaining something was because I had practiced this speech multiple times, so I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to say, which tends to keep my hands at bay. I believe that one of the strongest parts of my physical delivery was my use of eye contact. Even though I referred to my notes quite frequently while delivering my speech, I tried very hard to make eye contact with every single person in my audience. According to the textbook, this action of making eye contact with as many audience members as possible is called scanning (O’Hair, 150). The only area in this category of speech delivery that I need the most work on is my facial expressions. After the first sentence of my introduction, I stopped using facial expressions to express how important I felt my information was. According to the text, “From our facial expressions, audiences can gauge whether we are excited about, disenchanted by, or indifferent to our speech” (O’Hair, 149). My lack of facial expressions made it look like I could care less about the topic that I was
For example, while giving my speech, I made a conscious effort to make sure that I was fluctuating my voice as much as possible because I did not want to have a monotone voice. However, I noticed that towards the end of my speech, I started to sound less enthusiastic about my topic, which made the pitch of my voice go down, making the last two points of my speech very boring. The rate at which I gave my speech was nearly perfect at the beginning and I believe that this was the case because I knew what I was going to say and did not have to refer to my notes that often. But when I reached the part about the kinesthetic learner, I began to slow down and refer to my notes many more times than I had done previously. In doing so, my speech became choppier and you could tell that I was not as well informed about the last two learners, as I was about the first two learners. The amount of pauses in my speech are very distracting. For example when talking about reading/writing learners, I say the following: *looking at my notes with a two second pause* “um” …show more content…
I thought that this would be the case with my speech, yet I was very surprised to find that yes I moved my hands almost constantly, but that they did not seem to be that distracting to the audience. The only reason that I believe that I did not move my hands in dramatic motions like I usually would when explaining something was because I had practiced this speech multiple times, so I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to say, which tends to keep my hands at bay. I believe that one of the strongest parts of my physical delivery was my use of eye contact. Even though I referred to my notes quite frequently while delivering my speech, I tried very hard to make eye contact with every single person in my audience. According to the textbook, this action of making eye contact with as many audience members as possible is called scanning (O’Hair, 150). The only area in this category of speech delivery that I need the most work on is my facial expressions. After the first sentence of my introduction, I stopped using facial expressions to express how important I felt my information was. According to the text, “From our facial expressions, audiences can gauge whether we are excited about, disenchanted by, or indifferent to our speech” (O’Hair, 149). My lack of facial expressions made it look like I could care less about the topic that I was