Exploring Muncie, Indiana: An Informative Perspective

For the informative speech I chose to inform my audience about Muncie Indiana. I did this topic to get the attention of ball state students, and make them realize what an awesome place Muncie Indiana really is. I informed them on the history of Muncie to hopefully encourage them to get more involved in the community outside of classes. I feel that the students learned a lot about Muncie they would have never known. I do believe could have done a better job at making in more intriguing and kept their attention all the way through my speech. If I would have done this better I would have been able to sale the idea getting more involved with the city that brought thousands of students their college education.

The Informative speech was much harder for me to grasp on to right from the beginning, I knew what I need to do in general to be successful but my topic was so broad I had a hard time narrowing it down how I wanted to present the information. My introduction was

to the informational speech was just good as my demonstration speech, if not better. For my informative speech I was not as nervous in the beginning as I was for my demonstration speech. In the intro my voice wasn’t as shaky, so I sounded more confident in my topic. I opened with a topic statistic about ball state that all the students were able to relate with, gaining their interest right from the beginning.
The hardest part for me were the citations. In a paper I am relatively good at citing information but having to site it verbally is a different story. I believe that I could use some improvement with this. My first citation was a statistic I used in my introduction. This specific citation I believe went well but the other two did not. The next citation I was to say I said was said properly but it took me a few seconds to find it on my flashcard so I felt like that could have affected the way the students perceived my credibility. The third citation, I didn’t give an indication phrase that told my audience that I was about to give them a source because of this my audience, may not have even known it was a source. This could have also affected my credibility negatively. After this speech I believe though that I have a better grasp on the citation concept and I will be able to improve because of this.
The transitions between my points are what I believe hurt me the most. I had appropriate transition words and phrases but I was hesitated when saying them. In the middle of my speech I realized that my flashcards were out of order. At first I was trying to figure out the order but then I realized how unprofessional that looked and then decided to stop trying to put them in order. Therefore, the last half of my speech was said without any flashcards, although I knew what I was talking about I kept second guessing myself and this made me sound yet again unprofessional. If I could have presented the speech over again with my flashcards in the proper order I would have sounded much more professional.
This speech was hard for me compared to the demonstration speech to lay out since it was over the history of a city.

At first I felt that my information needed to be presented more as a timeline. I did not want this, so I delivered my topic in a way that would make the audience focus on three main point that they would remember after my speech was over rather than a timeline of random facts. I mentioned these three topics and then was able to seclude the most important parts of Muncie’s history. This allowed for the audience to stay focused throughout most of my speech.

Over all this speech went relatively well but there is always room for improvement. I believe that the three most important aspects of this speech that I would need to improve and implement into my next speech would be the verbal citations, keeping my flashcards in order, and making sure that I plan out the time I need for my speech more carefully. I believe that improving these three things for my next speech would make a great

impact.