Speech 4 Reflection

Start: 

I thought that this speech wen’t very well for our group, and even though we faced some problems in the beginning we really pulled through. That being said I still feel that there were some problems that we could have addressed better if we had more time. The biggest one that we faced is the time we were given to practice this as a group. Everyone of us had completely different schedules and found it extremely difficult to find the time to work together.  We were pretty nervous going into the presentation, because at that time we had only really practiced it about three times. It was the least amount of practice I’ve ever had doing a presentation. This did not really turn out to be a problem because the speech wen’t very well for all of us, but it did contribute to our nervousness. In the future I would like more time to practice in order to avoid nerves. 

One of the other things I would like to start in the future is to rely less on notes. This was also due to our lack of preparation, but it annoyed me because I haven’t needed them in the past. I felt that it was pretty clear that I was using notes throughout the presentation, and it took away from my characters. I always prefer watching speeches when people can just speak from memory and it’s clear that they had put in a lot of preparation. Especially having a role as a revolving character it would have looked much better if I didn’t need to look down at paper to know when I had to speak. 

Stop

One of the things I would like to stop doing is going over the time limit. Even if a speech is very good, I don’t think that most of the class likes to see one run long. This is the second time I’ve done a presentation that drastically goes over the amount were supposed to be talking, and I feel like it’s because of the lack of practice. If we put in more time to practice, we could have cut it down a little more and held on to the classes attention better. 

Continue

I felt that there was many thing in this speech that we all did very well and should continue to do.  One of the things I felt we did very well was to set up a realistic rhetorical situation. The PTA meeting was a good idea for presenting our idea and the discount gave us an excuse to talk to an audience in that setting. I also felt that the revolving characters that I played was a good idea by McCool, because it let us transition into ideas more elegantly. It also showed that we were able to address the concern of our audience. I also really liked how all of us were able to speak about the same amount. We were very well together and I would like to see that in other group projects that I may do in the future. The last thing that I would like to continue doing is to have an extremely well organized presentation. I feel that my organization for speeches have gotten better over time and this was by far the best it’s been.