Journal Four:
For the Lone Wolf Speech, I have chosen the prompt on how to become a better version of your academic self. To connect with the audience on this topic I plan to start off by being sympathetic to the challenges of furthering your academic mind, and how hard schoolwork actually can be for some. By doing this, the audience and I will end up on the same page regarding the emotions people feel about school and its stressors. Another thing that I could easily do to connect with the audience is to list out and eventually talk about the simple, obvious things one can do to start becoming a better version of themselves, people love that.
I selected this topic because I feel I am constantly trying to do this for myself. I am not the one to half-ass my homework and I am also not the one to make excuses about getting assignments done in school, they’re easy enough to just do them and afterwards you’ll feel much better knowing you completed something rather than just sitting there pondering it. I feel very passionately that most students think more than they do, and that could very well be the main reason that the majority of students are beyond stressed when it comes to schoolwork. I hope to make some sense out of the contradictory concepts I just laid out.
This is the narrative outline piece:
I’ll start off by asking if anyone gets stressed out by schoolwork, which will most likely receive an overwhelming response of “YES” from the audience. After that, I will do my best to construct an opinion on why and how that stress could just stop existing. I will then go on to explain what obvious strategies people could use to avoid this stress and on top of that, explain how most do not internalize and think about what these maneuvers actually mean. I would most likely end off this speech by reminding, or telling for some, that you are in control of what you do, what you can accomplish, and everything that goes along with that. Most people forget that last part sadly.
Outline:
Visual Aid:
Dry-Run Video:
My Best Advice Given:
The best advice that I gave to one of my peers was to maintain eye contact and to organize the speech so it’s a little more fluent. Her speech had all of the information necessary to have a great impact on the audience and herself, it was just a little messy after the first dry-dry run. She accepted this advice, which was very kind of her in the way she did it. By the next speech, I almost did not recognize it, because it had such fluidity it almost felt like she was talking to us in conversation. I thought that this was solid advice for a couple of reasons: it evidently helped with the next version of her outline/speech and she agreed with me after I mentioned it to her in class. The fact that she was already thinking about it can mean a lot of things, but hearing it from another person might have fully clarified it for her.
The Best Advice Received:
The best piece of advice that I received was to not go on so many tangents in my speech. There is a section in my speech that you have heard and will see that I drone on a few of my points with examples that were too long and too confusing in some parts. The reason why this was happening to my knowledge is that I was thinking while delivering the speech and sometimes my thoughts do not come out clear enough for interpretation. All I needed to do to address and accept this piece of advice was to slow down and really not think too much about what I was saying. When I did this, my speech became a whole lot more fluent and clear, at least I believe it did. This advice was probably the most negative piece I received during this process, so it meant a lot to me. I took it to heart, thought about how I could avoid going on tangents, and by the final speech I really believe I achieved that.
Journal Eight:
I watched the video of my dry-run speech and it was annoying to say the least, but everyone feels like that, so it’s not worth going into any further.
In general, I thought that my speech was very fluent. I stood up straight, made consistent eye contact only to the point where it is not awkward for the audience to look back at me, and maintained a steady flow through all of my ideas. What I also thought worked out well was the organization of my ideas, building upon them throughout, and summing up the main points at the end as an attempt to give the audience a main concept understanding in case they had gotten lost in my speech.
On a more negative note, there were a couple of things that I could keep working on. One of the two things that I will be focusing on before the final speech is clicking the right arrow key on my computer so that I could actually change my slides to go along with my speech. In the second practice run of the speech and the one with Lyle, I failed at this miserably, so bad to the point where I thought of just making a single page and putting that on the screen so I don’t get distracted by trying to remember to click the button. That’s an easy fix. A harder fix for my final presentation will be to organize the information on my outline perfectly, which is possible, but it’s going to take some more time and practice.
I am very excited to finish this project. I feel a certain sense of fulfillment already just by completing the preliminary presentations, so I can’t imagine what the end will bring.
Journal Ten:
I am not a big fan of presentations in front of audiences. They usually start off awkward and depending on how you end the introduction you can be looking at a fun, fluent presentation, or a disaster. This presentation/speech was different. I was right in the middle of those two poles before, during, and after delivering the speech. I feel impartial on this process and all of its elements, which does not mean that I can’t analyze how I did.
The process of coming up with an outline was the easiest step of the project. I say that because coming up with talking points and expanding on them spontaneously without worry is one of my strengths. If I were to not have practice runs before the final speech, that would be a different story. Regarding the dry runs: I thought they were very helpful in reducing the anxiety of presenting, and basically all of the nerves that normally go along with constructing a speech to give to an audience.
Peer review was mostly positive, which is alright, but I was really hoping for some up-front, honest, critical feedback.
I will use what I have learned in this project to further my confidence and abilities speaking in front of audiences. I thought that this solidified my strengths, exposed my weaknesses, and everything in between.
September 26th, 2021
-Colby
