Category: ENGRD 221RW- Oral Communication

The first speech that we worked on in this course was the “I Believe” speech. For this, I decided to write about the love I have with my mom and a special phrase that is important to both of us. I chose this topic because I felt confident in my ability to express my feelings onto the page. 

The most difficult part of the project was figuring out how to intertwine a story or narrative into my speech. Although there have been so many instances where my mom and I have said “no matter what” to each other, I couldn’t pinpoint a specific story to include. After some drafting and brainstorming I decided to write about the necklace that she gave me which has the phrase on it. By mentioning this piece of jewelry, I was able to go into detail about the meaningfulness of the phrase and what the necklace symbolizes. Once I selected this narrative to include, it was much easier to write the rest of the speech. 

Another challenging part of this project was figuring out how to end it. Usually for a standard essay, I end the paper with a conclusion paragraph that sums up the main idea of the essay; however, for this assignment that would not be sufficient. I needed to come up with an ending that tied my piece together without sounding too essay-like. Eventually, I decided to come full circle and end with a sentence about the necklace and the fact that because it symbolizes the love my mom and I have together, she will always be with me wherever I go. 

Overall, I am very pleased with how my project developed and turned out. I think it accurately describes a belief that is very important to me and I believe is something that my peers would enjoy learning about. 

The second speech in this course was the storytelling speech. For this speech I decided to tell a story about my grandfather that my mom told me as a child.

I thought that my overall storytelling speech was very successful and I feel very confident about how it went. I think I was successful in maintaining eye contact with my audience throughout the entire speech and using a good volume/tone. I tried to add emotion to various parts of the speech to add suspense or lead to a specific reaction from my audience based on what I was saying. Additionally, I felt that the content of my speech was good and received well by my audience; they laughed at the funny parts and were shocked at the surprising parts. One thing that I think I can work on is adding some more details, my speech ended up being a little under 4 minutes so I had some extra time where I could have included more details. 

I know that my audience was listening to me and was engaged with my speech because they looked drawn in and eager to hear what was going to happen next. After my speech, my audience’s reaction was very positive and they all seemed like they really enjoyed my speech. 

For the storytelling speech, we were told to only use a sheet of paper with a few notes on it. However, here is what I wrote out when first deciding what I wanted to say in my speech. In reality, because I did not have this paper during my speech, I changed some things in the moment and did not say everything exactly how it was written originally.

My third speech in this course was the “secret life of a word speech”. For this assignment, we were instructed to select a word that was meaningful to us and compose a speech about that word, including its history and importance. I decided to write this speech on my favorite word, “arbitrary”. Similarly, to the storytelling speech, we were only allowed to use one sheet of paper as notes for this 10 minute speech.

Above is what I wrote out when first deciding what I wanted to say in this speech. However, because I did not have this paper in hand during my speech, I cha

The final assignment we did in this class was a professional academic presentation. My group’s topic was orators who were involved in social movements and I chose to speak about Susan B. Anthony. I selected her because she is a women’s rights activist that I have always admired. I looked at her purposeful use of specific rhetorical strategies in her 1873 speech. We also created a visual component to go with our speech that was strong and contributed to our overall presentation.