My Best Advice: I believe that the best peer advice I gave through out the duration of this semester of public speaking would have been when I helped to suggest for someone to add in a story to there “what you mean to me speech”. While doing our first dry runs after listening to this persons ideas for there speech, they noticed that everyone had a story in their speech, so I suggested for them to add in a story about there family as well to build up their speech more.

Why Its My Best Advice: I think this is my best advice because it ended up being a very nice addition to this persons speech. Adding a story to the “what you mean to me” speech built it up and really helped to capture and show how meaningful that person was to you. If this person had not added a story to their speech I think that their speech would have been little dry and wouldn’t have had as much meaning to it.

Best Advice From My Peers: I think the best advice I received from my peers was to start to make outlines that would cause me to look up more. As well as practicing more at looking at the audience. I think that this advice was given to me when I presented my first speech and then after that I fixed it.

Why Its Their Best Advice: This was my peers best advice because it helped me to become a better public speaker. In the beginning of the year I made very big outlines that were word for word what I wanted to say which caused me to look down and rely on my outline a lot. Once one of my peers suggested that I look at the audience more I realized I should probably make a more bulleted outline or at least practice with a shorter outline to make myself look up more. Ever since I started doing this I think I look at audience more.

Big Reflective Moments (BRM):

Journal #9: I believe that my second speech on teaching a skill went much better than my first one. I felt much more prepared and really enjoyed teaching everyone how to overhand serve a volleyball. Since I knew the skill so well I felt much more comfortable delivering the speech and felt as though I knew the subject matter really well. I also spent a lot of time on making my video and practicing which I think made my speech much better. I think I still need to get more comfortable with not looking at my outline because even though I knew my subject really well I get nervous and look at my outline way more than I need to. According to the feedback from my peers I also need to work on not using so many filler words which I believe will come with practice and getting more experience and comfortable with public speaking. Overall I think my audience really liked my speech and found it easy to follow. One person even commented on how they wish that they had been taught how to overhand serve a volleyball the way I taught it because I made it really easy to understand. I also felt much more organized with this speech and hope to continue to get better and more comfortable with public speaking as we continue to practice more.

Journal #15: I personally really enjoyed writing and presenting speech #3. Being able to speak on behalf of my dad really made it easy and made me feel more comfortable while I was speaking in front of the class. I also think that this speak was much better than my others in regards to feeling more confident as well as making more eye contact and projecting my voice better. As we have been doing more speeches and getting the hang of practicing and knowing my strengths and weaknesses my speeches have gotten much better. The one thing that I am still having trouble with and know that I messed up on this speak with is the timing. I always end up talking really fast even if I don’t mean and I really try to slow myself down, but it never seems to work. In connection with that I think that it caused me speech to come in under the time it was supposed to be, which was three minutes. I personally think that toast speeches should be shorter, but I understand that I should still be meeting the time requirement for my speeches. Overall I think that this was the best speech yet this semester and it was definitely the one I felt most confident while doing.

Why These Reflective Moments Matter: These reflection moments mattered because they both explain my two favorite speeches that I did. In both of these journals I explain how much I enjoyed giving these two speeches and I believe it was because I really enjoyed the topic we were talking about. With the first journal entry that was about my speech that I gave on how to serve a volleyball, and I really enjoyed giving this speech because it came almost naturally to me which made it much easier for me to give the speech. Also with the second journal entry was about the speech about my dad which was also a very easy speech for me to give because it was about my dad and about our relationship. I chose these two journals because they were about two speeches that I really enjoyed giving and came easy to me because they were about topics that I liked. This made me realize how much easier it is for me to give a speech on something that I enjoy talking about.

My Biggest Strides: From dry run to my actual presentation I believe my biggest stride was during my ‘what you mean to me’ speech. I remember that during my dry run for this speech I was not very prepared because I was having trouble writing the speech in general and kept going back and fourth between what I wanted to add into the speech and what I didn’t. Once I decided on an outline, after the dry runs were already over, I really liked my speech and enjoyed presenting it to the class. I felt very confident giving this speech and thought it came out really good and was happy I could be talking about how much my dad means to me because it made me enjoy giving the speech even more. This is why I think I took my biggest stride from dry run to final presentation during this speech.

Final Outline:

Intro: 

  • Its week 14 in the semester and all of a sudden you are told that you have to prove to your professor and your entire class that you should pass the class
  • You start thinking about all the reasons you should pass the class
    • The amount of effort you put in
    • The amount of time you spent preparing for various speeches
    • Even just showing up to class
  • But you need better examples of that because those things are expected of you
  • So you start thinking even deeper to come up with reasons to pass

Body:

  • The first reason why I should pass this class is because of a time where I gave very good advice to help advance someone’s speech
    • It was during the dry runs for our ‘What You Mean to Me’ speech and after going through everyone in my group Aaron realized that he didn’t have a short little story or narrative in his speech but everyone else did
    • After he said this, he asked if he should add one and I said yes because I thought it would heighten the level of his speech
    • I also helped him to brainstorm or talk about what story he was going to talk about his speech
    • I think that this was the best “advice” or at least help I have given to a peer in this class and I believe it is one of the reasons I should pass this class
  • Another reason why I should pass this class is because of how much better I have gotten at giving speeches and how much more comfortable I am to stand up in front of everyone and speak
    • I remember my first speech and I mean it was okay but even when I look back at my reflection for my first speech I wasn’t too impressed with how I did.
    • As I went on going through my reflections I found that after speech #2 and #3 I was much happier with how those speeches went and how I presented my topics
      • For my reflection of speech #2 (journal 9) I even wrote “I believe that my second speech on teaching a skill went much better than my first one. I felt much more prepared and really enjoyed teaching everyone how to overhand serve a volleyball.”
      • And for my reflection of speech #3 (Journal 15) I stated “Being able to speak on behalf of my dad really made it easy and made me feel more comfortable while I was speaking in front of the class. I also think that this speak was much better than my others in regards to feeling more confident as well as making more eye contact and projecting my voice better.”
    • I feel that as the semester went on I really improved my confidence level and overall become a better public speaker, especially in these two speeches.
  • Finally, I think I should I pass this based on one of my biggest strides during this class
    • My biggest stride was between my dry run of my ‘What you mean to me’ speech and my actual presentation of that speech
    • During my dry run of this speech I remember being very flustered because I didn’t know what I wanted to talk about and I showed up to the dry run with probably half of an outline because I decided I wanted to switch it write before class.
    • After this dry run, i went back and wrote out my whole outline and practiced and when i went to present my speech i think it was my best one
    • This speech was the most meaningful to me and the easiest for me to present because of that 
    • I felt that from my dry run to my actual presentation was a very big change and I was truly happy with my final product which made this my biggest stride for a speech in this semester

Conclusion:

  • Based on the fact that I was able to give good advice/help my peers brainstorm, my improvement in speech giving and my overall confidence, and the big strides