Journal #1 

Chapter 1 shows just how important being able to publicly speak is as a skill. Developing a sense of inclusiveness in public speaking was another important theme of this chapter. A theme I particularly like is being able to talk to many people of different backgrounds and ethnicities, from all parts of life. When you talk to a lot of people, everyone comes from different backgrounds, and you get different opinions. Getting the message across is a public speaker’s goal, so being able to connect to a large variety of people is an amazing skill to obtain.

Journal #2 

As someone who has been playing sports all of my life, I am a firm believer in practice makes perfect. With football, you can never be too prepared for your opponent and I think that translates really well to the rest of life. I have been able to give plenty of public speeches and with each one my practice has increased. For each speech or activity I prepared for, the time given for practice and my performance were proportional. I have definitely become more and more comfortable with public speaking with every performance and I think we can always get better so by taking these opportunities I hope to continue improving my public speaking as well as other overlapping social skills. 

Journal #3 

I believe I showed confidence, had a strong voice that carried well, good eye contact, good use of my hands, did a good job going for a more friendly and reserved style of speech that connected well with the audience. That being said, I definitely slightly rushed though, mumbled over some words, use of buffer terms (uh, like, etc.), and I think transition from theme to theme would have been smoother and more enjoyable for the listener. I think overall the speech went well and I plan on learning from these mistakes and continue to improve

Journal #4 

Chapter 11 discusses the importance of organization to a speech. An organized speech first sounds much more professional, but is also much more pleasing to listen to. Transitions from topic to topic are also extremely important. This is something that personally, I need some work on. A good way to transition is to intertwine the next topic with the current topic before fully indulging in the next part of your speech. 

Chapter 12 shows us the different types of speech patterns there are. The six types of organization are spatial pattern, casual pattern, chronological pattern, problem-solution pattern, topical pattern, and narrative pattern. You can use these patterns to help organize and give your speech structure. Personally there is not a specific pattern I like the most as I normally switch up what kind of style I want to go with depending on the speech.  

Journal #5 

Lizzy and I first shared contact information so that we could communicate on the speech while not in class. We know which skill we want to teach and we have an outline of what we want to cover. We have found there is a lot of information to cover with our skill so we plan on just going for it in the dry run, and adjusting the information we give from there. Whenever one of us works on the speech we communicate to let the other know so that they can see the edit you made and make adjustments off of that. We have been doing a good job of giving both of our opinions and collaborating for how the speech should go.

Journal #6 

Chapter 13 shows the importance of preparing a good outline for your speech. You have your working outline which is a longer outline that has most of the information that you will be talking about. The outline I gravitated to the most is the phrase outline. This is the use of just a word or few words to give you all the information you need for a particular part of your speech or transition into another topic smoothly. I noted certain examples covered in the book to go back to when going over my next speeches.  

Journal #7 

After watching our dry-run video, Lizzy and I saw a lot we needed to improve on. I think most importantly we need to make the speech more understandable for someone who does not already know how chess works so that it can connect with all listeners. We also need to work on how long the speech is  as our dry-run took much longer than the time limit. Lizzy and I plan on reading what the class thought of our dry-run, making the changes already explained and going from there. 

Journal #8

Lizzy and I have been working towards finishing our presentation of our skill. We have used the comments from others to shorten our speech, as well as make certain changes that we both deem as fit to change. This includes shortening, leaning more towards the basics and not going into too great of detail, as well as adding better pictures to help the audience visualize what we are saying. We have both done a good job staying in contact and informing each other of when we make changes to the presentation. 

Journal #9 

After delivering our speech, I think Lizzy and I did really well. We had a long way to go from our dry-run and I think we made substantial leaps to better our speech. I believe that we were able to make chess much more understandable and we decided at instead of trying to teach as much as we can in the time limit, we decided on make a more precise crash course in how to play as well as adding those small details at the end of our speech by adding a vocabulary section and further tips. We also had much more confidence in our official run, I think this was shown by how we did not rush through any information as well as maintaining good eye contact and positive posture. I’m honestly pretty proud of this speech as Lizzy and I worked very well together and came out with a finished product that we can be proud of. 

Journal #10

Though I was already a confident public speaker, the two speeches performed definitely increased my confidence in myself. I also think that these 2 speeches were very different and though I have given group presentations before, teaching a skill with a partner was a unique public speaking opportunity that I have not had before. Using what I have learned from past speeches, I will create a good speaking outline and use plenty of practice to improve the speech. Using a good outline and practice will not only make my next speech easier as well as sound much better.