Well, my second speech is coming up on wednesday. This time I'm not so nervous about it, which is good. I guess because I know the procedure of things this time that it won't be so bad. The biggest problem I'm having right now is weeding through all my research in order to find information for my speech. My speech is on the pop art movement and I have a few books, some articles, and a few webpages I am using. The only problem is that the books and the articles are dense whereas the webpages give smaller tidbits of imformation. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground between the two. Something I'd like to work on for the next speech is my time (defintely) and probably my pacing and tone. Also I need to stop relying so much on my paper. Well, those are my goals for the informative speech and hopefully I am able to improve on some (if not all) of those areas.

-amber

Now that my speech is over I can reflect on all the areas I need to work on. I'm glad my speech is over. I'm really not fond of speech giving and I get really nervous when I have to give one. It wasn't as bad as I thought, but I still feel like I need to work on eye contact and trying to not rely so much on my outline. I pretty much agree with everyone's suggestions in class. Next time I'm going to try and practice in front of my roomates so that next time I won't be so nervous getting up in front of the class.

Now that my speech is over I can reflect on all the areas I need to work on. I'm glad my speech is over. I'm really not fond of speech giving and I get really nervous when I have to give one. It wasn't as bad as I thought, but I still feel like I need to work on eye contact and trying to not rely so much on my outline. I pretty much agree with everyone's suggestions in class. Next time I'm going to try and practice in front of my roomates so that next time I won't be so nervous getting up in front of the class.

Tomorrow I give my speech. I'm not overly fond of public speaking and I'm really nervous about it. I've worked on my speech and added as much detail as I possibly can without writing the entire thing out. I feel like it's ok but the experience I choose to write about is so fuzzy in my memory that I'm worried as though there will not be enough detail to fully convey my point. Also I'm worried about my delivery. After going over all the different elements in delivering a speech I'm nervous that my delivery won't be good or I'll forget to use an element or something along those lines. Also I'm worried about the organization of my speech and whether or not its effective. Finally, I'm hoping my speech is long enough and that I'm able to speak slowly enough so that the audience can understand my story instead of going "what did I just hear?". Well, that's all for now. Time to go practice.

--amber

This semester in speech I hope to accomplish several goals. First off, I've never liked giving speeches so I hope I can gain some sort of tolerance for speech-giving so that in other classes if I'm required to give a speech I can do so without having a total meltdown. Also, I'd like to become more confident with my speech giving and I'd like to be able to give speeches without using fillers such as "um" and "like". As of now I am liking this class very much and hopefully I will learn a lot more about public speaking.