I think that there are several things that I will take from this class that I will use in my future. The first thing that I know that I will use is the organizational patters that we learned throughout the class. It has taught me to be better organized and to think about the different ways to organize information. I also found the adapting to the audience concept to be very useful and there were several things about that that I did not think about before we read it in the book. I also think that relating to the audience, like we learned in a few of the chapters, will be useful later in life. I never realized that letting people know how something affects them and relates to them was so important in persuading them. The practicing and preparation concepts that I learned and used for the speeches will also help me in life.

Class Concepts

There were quite a few concepts that really helped me in preparing my speech. First off, the chapter detailing how to organize the outline was very helpful since I'm always a little confused with how the outline is supposed to be arranged. It helped me to arrange my points in a way that would be comprehensible to my audience and also let me plan where to put my supporting material. The second chapter that helped me in the book was the chapter on the introduction and conclusion, I didn't realize how important they were in my speech and that it was important in getting and keeping my audience’s attention. I really improved my introduction and conclusion by the final speech by using a story that caught everyone’s attention and a conclusion that made people think. And the last concept from the book that I really thought was important was adapting to the audience. I never really thought much about how the audience could be different merely because of the time of day or the location. It’s definitely something that I will take into account if I ever need to give a speech again.

Favorite Speech

My favorite speech that we did for this semester probably had to be the informative speech. The reason that speech was my favorite because I really loved the subject that I picked since it has been a long time hobby of mine. I also learned a lot about the camera's history and mechanics in my research, benefitting not only my audience but myself as well. This was also the speech that I was the most comfortable giving, I knew the material fairly well and was very confident in what I was presenting. I usually am pretty nervous speaking up front, but speaking on something that I really loved helped me overcome that pretty easily. Unfortunately I did have to rush through some of the material because of the time limit, so I hope that everyone was able to understand everything that I was saying. I definitely have improved a lot because of this class, and I know that it will help me in my future.