Speech Day

Today class was dedicated to "This I Believe" speeches. I personally found it very unique and conceptually creative.

Overall, the speeches went well. There were likes and dislikes Ben pointed out by the end of class which were mostly content-related but not so much about presenting skills.

I will use this post to discuss about communication and presenting skills of the class in general.

I noticed eye-contact from almost everyone in this class. This is a great feature because a lot people usually get nervous when giving speeches, and if they are nervous they usually look down to avoid eye contact. Fortunately our class had marvelous audience-interaction skills.

Another feature that I'd like to mention is, as Will has pointed out in class, random and unnecessary movements and actions during the speech. I could understand that it would feel uncomfortable to stand still and talk for a couple of minutes while maintaining eye-contact with the audience. In my opinion, a little bit of movements would not be so distracting and in fact they could be useful in this case. The movements could perhaps help the presenter maintain his/her calmness through out the speech. In addition, they could serve as illustrations, too. It is important, however, to note that it might only work in this particular scenario because the speeches are somewhat written in an informal and passionate voice. For professional speeches, such random and unnecessary movements are usually not recommended.

One more thing about speech-presenting I'd like to discuss and if anyone ever feels the same way feel free to comment. Perhaps it is just me, but have you ever tried to read the audience's facial expressions and guess what they are thinking while listening to your speech? I mean I could really tell if a person in the crowd is not paying attention immediately but to know what they currently think about the speech could be a challenging task.