As one who doesn't get particularly nervous giving speeches, I tried to be sure and focus on at least one thing that I could take from these early, introductory videos and build upon it. Specific to our next speech, I found that Janine's tip about finding a subject that interests me particularly stood out. The whole time that I have been brainstorming about what to give my Culture Speech about I have been thinking to myself, "What topic would interest my fellow students the most." As I have barely gotten to know any of you (not to say that you all didn't do a fabulous job on your Intro Speeches) this was certainly the wrong tactic to employ. When watching the videos it dawned on me that the primary purposes of my speech were to inform the audience about me through my culture and hopefully to entertain them. If my topic is something that I am passionate about I will certainly feel more at ease and will give a much more interesting speech than if I am struggling to read their collective minds as to what they want to hear.
In Julie's video I picked up that she was using her hands a lot during her speech. She was far from flamboyant with them, yet it was enough to draw my eye until toward the end of the video I noticed that she had been looking at her notes a lot. As one who's eyes are too often drawn to my notecards, I now realize that this would be an excellent strategy for me to employ that will serve the dual purpose of keeping my audience from getting bored, as well as to distract them from eyes if I am looking down at my notecards too much. Bit by bit, I already feel that I am improving at public speaking.
"How does an ant eat an elephant? One bite at a time." -Anonymous
You are very lucky to be so confident in your abilities with public speaking. I hope that I can get up in front of the class this Thursday and feel as at ease as you say you do when you do speeches. My culture speech topic has also been giving me some problems because the book has talked a lot about knowing your audience, but in our case we have only ever seen the people in our audience once. I think it's a good idea that you had to just find something that you are passionate about and use that as your topic. If you sound interested in what you are saying and can show the audience that they should think what you are saying is interesting, then I'm sure it will sound great. I will have to remember to employ this idea when writing my own speech. I also noticed that Janine used her hands a lot. I hope this is not too difficult for me because I always feel so dramatic when I use my hands a lot while making a speech. It's something I will have to work on in the mirror I guess.
ReplyDeleteIt hasn't "dawned" on me yet, but I get what your saying. I'm still fearing that no one will like my topic. For example, if I do a report of my trip to Indonesia will people find my culture interesting as I do? I'm also jealous that you feel so confident in the topic you choose and wish I could be more like you. keeping the audience entertained seems to be the question and your solution makes sense to be more active and excited when giving your presentation. I think that the feedback we get from our first presentation will be very good for us to tell us what was successful and what was not.
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