Monday, December 13, 2010

Equality for all Sexual Orientations and Gender Expressions Speech

After watching my video a few times I guess I'll start with the most obvious thing I noticed which was my physical appearance.. While I was under the impression that I had stopped standing on one foot and swaying from side to side in my speeches, I clearly retreated back to my old ways this time. Not only was I not standing on both feet for most of my speech, but when I was I was making some pretty ridiculous angles with my legs. I think my posture attributed a lot to the shakiness in my voice and the discomfort I felt in front of our classroom.
If I had to relate all of my speeches I think I would say this was my worst one, which I am rather disappointed about for a number of reasons
As noted above, my voice was not confident or clear. My volume fluctuated too much and in the wrong places (ie. no for emphasis, but because I was trying to catch my place in my notes again. In addition, I used filler words as transitioning sentences because I was so flustered. This happened for two reasons, in the beginning when I would use a filler word it was because I was trying to get back on track and had lost my place in my note cards, but towards the end I was rushing because I realized I was quickly running our of and exceeding the time limit.
This brings up another negative part of my speech, while I typically speed up when I'm nervous in this case I slowed down and mumbled. In addition to making my over all points less clear this increased my speech time by almost 2 minutes... an obvious negative consequence.
The last bad thing that happened was because I was flustered and lost while giving my speech, many of my main points were not made. I even skipped slides on my power point and full sections of my speech to accommodate for the time restraints.
While in the past I would attribute all of these negative aspects of my speech to not practicing enough, I honestly thought I had this time. Clearly I was wrong.
I promise I am not trying to be the most negative person in our class!!! Even if it seems that way, I am just truly disappointed with how this speech turned out because it is a topic I am so passionate about. I have given speeches to talks about having equality for all sexual orientations and gender expression to my high school teachers, peers, strangers using offensive language in the mall and here in the library on our campus, my family members, and even the RF police department. I shouldn't have been as nervous as I was and I guess my speech was simply another example of how practice is th most important part of giving a speech.
As for positives, I do think I had some concrete examples of logical reasons discrimination against different sexual orientations is harmful and wrong and I think I pulled from ethos, logos, and pathos well by using some well known sources like the FBI and Human Rights Campaign, powerful statistics that I related back to our own campus, and by establishing credibility by talking about my time researching the topic and my experience with it in the past and present.
To summarize, my speech was less than satisfactory in my opinion and that could have been fixed with more practice, but there were still come positives in the end.

3 comments:

  1. I agree one of the largest things to work on would be planting your feet. I didn't notice your transitions being as rough as you're making them out to be, but I do remember you skipping slides. I know how you feel with the time crunch also. I thought the speed you were talking at was good though. You've improved on slowing it down a lot. And no doubt, I could easily tell you were very knowlegeable on the subject! Don't bash yourself too much, it was still a good persausive speech. Just practice a little more next time and keep up the fight. :)

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  2. Hi Joanna! First off I want to say that for me, something about your speech was very immersive and easy to listen to. As for stance and posture I didn't catch up on anything too distracting but as far as something to improve on it might be a good start to work on that and overall tone. Although this persuasive speech didn't exactly apply to me since I already support equal rights for all orientations and gender expressions, I could also see how this speech accomplished it's objective, to persuade. Good job!

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  3. Hey Joanna.
    So the one thing I noticed about your speech was your stance. Your feet weren't planted and it led to some odd movements and was distracting. I also did notice that you'd skipped a few slides, but I could tell that that was simply because of a time restraint.
    But I seriously think you are being really hard on yourself, because it really wasnt bad! I could see how strongly you felt about your topic and that it made it really interesting to watch. Your points were strong and were easy to comprehend. I would just say practice a little bit before and it would have been a litte less rough. But overall, I was very impressed with you and your speech!

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