Month: September 2017

In my rehearsal videos I noticed I spent a lot of time reading directly off my notes and not making much eye contact. I think this is because when doing speeches in high school I always had the entire thing written out so it felt like that was what I should be doing. I really hope that as the semester goes on I will be able to rely less on my notes and I want to start to be able to use dot points on my notes rather than writing out my entire speech.

In the reading by Joseph Zompetti evidence is defined as “any material that supports, justifies or proves a claim that is being presented.” I found this reading really help full because I had never thought of all the different ways evidence is presented within a speech or piece of writing. I had also never considered that when you address different audiences different types of evidence may be more appropriate to use. For example, if you were talking to an audience made up mostly of children the use of examples would be better than statistics or expert testimony when presenting your argument, however when speaking to an older audience using statistics and expert testimony would help increase the credibility of your overall argument.

In Mikael Collvilles speech he argued that bicycle helmets are not necessarily very effective, do you agree with this?

Do you think that the use of bicycles will continue to grow in San Francisco and that changes will be implemented to encourage the use of bicycles?

I think overall my presentation went better than I expected it to because I usually get a lot more nervous before speaking than I did. Presenting outside really helped to ease my nerves, I think this was because it felt like a less intense environment. I used my notes less than I expected to which I was really happy about because I expected to find myself reading off them completely. In the future I want to try and lay my notes out in a way that makes it easier for me to reference them quickly rather than having to take a few seconds to look through and find points in them. I think for next time I need to work on projecting my voice further and considering the outdoor surroundings because I am used to speaking in a classroom without all the background noise. I also want to work on using words like um less when I speak.  Finally I want to work on having a stronger conclusion to my speech because I feel like I ended it really abruptly  without summarising what I had said.