Ponyise Chapter 9

Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 discuss the best way to get your point across. Whether it is through the appearance or your voice, they play significant roles in delivering a solid speech. The chapters cover a lot of important points that can make a speech significantly better.

Chapter 8 talks about poise. Poise is a major key for speeches. Just about every speech giver suffers from nerves, regardless of who they are and how much experience they have. The chapter discuss how people over exaggerate the fear of public speaking. Many articles talk about how the fear of public speaking is bigger than the fear of death, yet Palmer talked about how any student that he has assigned a speech has delivered it, and not done half bad. Chapter 8 talks about how confidence plays a significant role in your poise. It also talks about how we must learn our flaws, such as annoying gestures. We then must find a way to break the habits. Bad habits lead to the audience getting distracted. Once you have a disengaged audience, people begin to start getting less and less from your speech. The book also talks about the

importance of posture. Similar to bad habits, a bad posture can take away from your speech. For example, if you are constantly moving throughout your speech, it is extremely distracting, but on the contrary, if you are locked up and still you appear boring and scared. Mistakes are going to happen when giving a speech so is important to acknowledge them throughout your speech and move on. It is important to have flow and have a smooth, relaxed, and confident voice, and experience is the best way to get there.
Rather than focusing on the body language of speech giving, chapter 9 talked about voice.

The title of the chapter is Voice: Make Every Word Heard. The chapter defines a speech as a good conversation that is magnified. The author says that different audiences require different volumes. Everybody must be able to understand every single word you say. Going off of that, you not only must be heard, but you must be able to be heard. Not only does the lack of ability to pronounce a word make you look uneducated, but it doesn’t allow the audience to understand you. The final topic in the chapter is vocal patterns. It is important to maintain the same tone throughout the entire speech, unless you are raising or lowering it to make a point. Often times people find themselves talking softer at the end of a sentence rather than keeping the same tone the entire

time.
Both chapters are important to the presentation of a great speech. Rather you are talking about voice, volume, posture, and even enunciation, they all must be executed to have a solid speech.