Critical Essay On Being A Public Speaker

1036 Words3 Pages

I finally have the power! After a semester of taking a course about hiding glossophobia as best as I can, while juggling critical thinking and persuasion skills in a public speaking setting. I have finally been given the power to judge others, who have set out on the path of becoming a great public speaker, on how well they can hide their own fear of public speaking. Countless minutes have I spent throughout the semester looking for a good speaker to write my critique paper on; someone interesting, speaking about an interesting topic. Someone I deemed the perfect victim of my judgement! In the end I found no one was actually worthy, and I had to resort to the speech intramurals at DVC (also the extra credit was very enticing).
My goal during …show more content…

It was obvious that a lot of the speakers were there purely for the extra credit but some of the speeches were actually pretty impressive. Aside from Jason there were a couple other students who were great public speakers at the intramurals whom I greatly considered using as the subjects of my critical essay. There was a common trend of public speaking mistakes I noticed, the worst one being the usage of, “hi, my name is so-and-so”, as an attention getter and ending with, “thank you for listening”, as a conclusion. Aside from that, there were a lot of biased and bad sources cited throughout the event and a lot of the speakers would apologize after stumbling in their words, some spoke like robots, some made sure we all knew that there was no flipping way they would be wasting their Friday at that event if they weren’t failing their course, one of them even had the audacity to read his speech from his phone. I even got to watch an exchange student talk about how bad America sucks and why we should take a semester to study in another country to learn about how much better other cultures are compared to ours (Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle must not have been part of his current COMM course’s curriculum). But in the end, speakers like Jason made me feel like judging at this event was worth it, not only for the extra credit and a topic to write about, but also as an

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