How I Went about Writing My Speech

Writing a speech is easy. Telling someone about a speech you have to give is easy. Practicing your speech is easy. Giving a speech is not. Through my public speaking class I learned a lot about the art of giving speeches, creating a logical outline of my speech, and a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of my public speaking ability. My overall strengths as a speaker are that I can maintain eye contact with an audience and can convey the passion I have for certain topics to my audience. My overall weaknesses are that I can get caught talking to fast, causing me to skip sentences or words, and my ability to create an outline for my speech. I will go through my informative and persuasive value speech looking at three different criteria’s, content, delivery and overall assessment, and asses myself thoroughly. Even though I do not have the audio to my informative speech, I can still assess my mannerisms and eye contact.

When it came to the introductions of my speeches I used many different techniques. In my informative speech on how to vote in an election I used statistic like, “According to an article in the Huffington Post titled, “Youth Vote 2012 Turnout,” by Tyler Kingkade, only 19% of the voter turnout in the 2012 election was by people from the age of 18-25,” to provide my audience with a statement that was baffling and startling to catch their attention. In my persuasive value speech I did not have a topic as popular as voting for elections, so I had to familiarize my audience with players of Duke basketball and some history of their team. My persuasive value speech introductory sentence was necessary due to my audience’s lack of knowledge about Duke basketball and their program. In my conclusions, I used a very firm and act...

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...g better outlines and putting more time towards my outline. With a better outline I believe your speech skills will improve because you can implement places in your outlines to remind yourself to pause, emphasis certain points, use hand gestures at certain points. To achieve this I will spend more time on my outline and go into greater detail in my outline to make small points that can help me during my speech.

Over the course of the semester I realized I’m very far from a perfect public speaker but I can aspire to become one. With the feedback I have received over the semester and from evaluating my strengths and weaknesses while looking at my delivery, content, and overall assessment, I can become a better public speaker and a better speaker overall. You words are valuable in the world of academia and even more valuable when you know what you’re doing with them.