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In the beginning of public speaking, I had many goals. Some of them were to get over my fear of speaking in front of an audience. Others goals were the basic ones like annuciation, pacing my speeches better, and stuff like making my speeches interesting for the audience. I wanted to be able to speak freely and confidently, without making mistakes or slipping up when I'm talking. I also wanted to be able to write a good speech. It's not easy to capture the audiences attention but that's what I wanted to lean. Posture was another important factor. I wanted to be able to stand still and look confident when I was speaking. These are some of the goals I had for this semester of public speaking.
When it comes to all these goals, I think I met a good amount of them. I know there is still tons of room for improvement. First, when it comes to pacing, I struggled with that for the most part but I felt during the end I slowed down and improved a little. I was always aware that I speaking too fast and I tried to tell myself to relax and slow the pace. Along with pacing would be volume. I noticed that I would start off loud and then quiet down as time passed. I felt I met this goal because I heard myself get louder through my recorded videos. I noticed I started off the year speaking really fast and quietly and near the end I was talking at a slower pace and I was louder than before. When it came to the idea of making my speeches interesting, I noticed that it was pretty consistent and I could have done a better job of adding more emotion and excitement to what I was saying. I don't feel I really improved in that category as much as I would have like to.
Something that I need to work on was the monologue that we did and we needed to add emotion to it. I felt like I didn't have any expression and no excitement to it. When it comes to acting for the monologue, I did a pretty bad job. Thats the thing I would work most on. Among all of the monologues and speeches, I would say I am most proud of the final Ted Talk speech. I felt that I spoke clearly and paced well(thanks to the teleprompter), and my content wasn't too bad. I thought I had some good and clear points about my topic. There was stuff I could have done to improve it but I felt overall it wasn't bad.
I could take away many things from this class about how to be a good public speaker but I feel the main idea would be to always be confident I what you are saying because even if what you say makes no sense, if you seem confident, others will respect and trust your opinion. That is something I definitely have to work on because I don't feel as confident as I should be. I learned that when your confident with what you are saying, everything else like pacing and annunciation comes naturally, which is really helpful for me. This is why I want to improve my confidence level.  This is main thing I have learned from public speaking class.