Helpful concepts

The concepts that I take away from Public Speaking that werehelpful in preparing speeches were the organizational patterns we learned of,engaging our audience, and watching ethical guidelines. The organizationalpatterns we learned of were the most helpful perhaps because they were the mainpart of speeches, at least for me. Using organizational patterns to prepare myspeech outlines helped me figure out the main points that I wanted to presentin my speech, along with the information I wanted to attach to those points.Organizing the speech in this manner also helped me process my thoughts to formmy speech and the flow of it from going from the introduction, to the mainpoints, and the conclusion. Learning ways to engage our audience and watchingethical speaking guidelines was also helpful because it made the speech morecredible, when I considered who I was speaking to and double checking facts aswell.

What I take away...

The first day that I walked into this class, I am not going to lie I was dreading it with my whole being. Although I had experienced public speaking before I was not a huge fan. I got anxiety at the thought of even presenting in front of a large audience. The first time I presented which was the culture speech, I remember being so nervous, but once it was over I felt relieved. After surviving my first speech the others grew easier I’m guessing with familiarity to my audience, and the techniques that I was learning in class. I realized that the outlines we made ahead of time were a great way to organize my speech into main points, which made practicing and presenting easier. As I finish with this course I realize there isn’t much to be anxious about public speaking as long as the speaker prepares well and tries to understand their audience.

Favorite speech

Although all the speeches we presented in public speaking had different prompts and styles that taught me various fundamentals on the presentation of speeches. So far in this class my favorite two speeches were the culture speech as well as the demonstrations speech. I enjoyed presenting the cultural speech because it gave me a chance to reflect on myself and really narrow down what points I wanted to make about a specific cultural aspect. I also loved the presentation of the culture speeches as our first speech because it gave the entire class kind of  a way to learn something about one another and get familiar with each other. The demonstration speech was also another good one because we were required to not only stand there and present but demonstrate too, which helped  show how to multitask during a presentation instead of just standing up there to simply present. I liked how we were able to provide our introduction and take some time out to demonstrate as well.

Reasoning

There are four types of reasoning methods introduced to us in chapter 15; deductive reasoning, inductive, casual, and analogical. When I read about these and looked back at recent persuasive conversations that I have had with others I noticed two of these four reasoning methods most commonly used by me, which were casual reasoning, followed by deductive reasoning. I recently tried to persuade my friend to start working out to deal with her fatigue. Her response to me was that it doesn’t make sense for her to exercise if she’s already tired, it will just make her more tired. I tried to explain to her through casual reasoning that exercise provides your body increased energy so that she wouldn’t feel tired necessarily after exercise but may perhaps benefit from being more tired later at night to allow her to get better sleep. She argued it didn’t make sense. Then I used deductive reasoning in which I presented to her where I showed her examples of articles in which people that exercised experienced greater amounts of energy, concluding to her that she would experience the same.

The 4 types of Appeals

Chapter 15 describes four types of appeals that are used by speakers to support claims and they are logos, ethos, pathos, and mythos appeals. Each of these appeals relies on a different method of proving points to support a claim. The logos appeal relates to logical proof, this means that a speaker must present facts and statistics to logically prove their point. The Ethos appeal is an appeal that relates to how credible the speaker is. If throughout the speech the speaker presents enough solid facts then this appeal could be used. An appeal to the emotions of the audience would correspond with the pathos appeal in which the speaker must stimulate the audience’s feelings to uphold a claim. This appeal may not just work on its own and may need a combination of another appeal to win the favor of most audiences. An appeal to certain cultural beliefs, Mythos, may be a difficult appeal to present to an audience unless the speaker can directly relate it to a commonly known cultural tale, song, rhyme or etc.

Immersed in a Sea of Persuasion

We are surrounded by persuasive messages everywhere in our daily lives. We are persuaded to do things by the media, our family and friends, and also through hearing others speak. The media immerses us in a sea of persuasion through advertisements. Commercials are made in a way that persuade us to make certain purchases, sometimes even showing a competing brand of the same product, telling us to pick one over the other for various reasons. Our family and friends also use persuasion in order to get us to do something. Examples of family and friends immersing us in a sea of persuasion could be everyday simple things such as a mother persuading her children to do their chores, or getting good grades by using methods of persuasion. We encounter persuasion almost every day with our friends who constantly try to talk us into things. Speeches are heard by many, an example would be the recent elections in which many politicians used the methods of persuasion to gain votes. A listener must identify what they are trying to be persuaded about and weigh out the positives and negatives that go along with their actions along with outcomes.