The Importance Of Public Speaking And Speech

In Mr. Sickles’ class in 8th grade, we had to make a four-year plan. The goal was to see what class options we had in high school and what our schedules could potentially look like. Mr. Sickles told us that, as required by the school, we had to take either Public Speaking or Speech to get our speech credit. He further explained that Public Speaking is a transfer credit (a credit that might transfer to our future college) if we take it Junior or Senior year. He also told us that if we took Speech, it would only count as a high school class. With all of this information, I decided my best option would be to take Public Speaking as a Junior. I did not want to stress out over this class my Senior year, so my best option would be to get it done

I feel more comfortable talking in front the class because I know the atmosphere. I was extremely nervous at first because I did not know if people were going to judge more or not. I would eventually get over it. Now, I do not care whether or not people will judge me or not; I only want to get my speech spoken and graded. Also, I think not practicing it a lot has really helped me. I only read through my speech once, and that was in my head, not out loud. I know that is bad to say, but it works for me. I tend to overthink things way too much; when I start overthinking, my nerves start kicking in and my speech turns into a mess. I start losing my spot and slurring words. My face gets really red and I cannot focus. Another way how I improved on speaking publicly is simply by telling the story instead of over-annunciating the words. When I talk to people one-on-one, I tend to mumble. While giving speeches in public, I do not want to mumble so I annunciate my words. This can come off as choppy sentence fluency. When I only focus on the story and nothing else, I am able to speak without any significant

I like to do facial expressions because that is how I express myself every day. Trying to keep a straight face is not my thing. When I am upset, you will get the stare. When I am excited, there’s a smile on my face. When I am annoyed, you will see the eye rolls. I also like the idea of doing gestures because to me, that is as much communication as actual speaking is. People that are deaf or mute have to communicate in some way other than writing down their thoughts on a piece of paper, right? They use the universal gesture language called “sing language”. It is just as powerful as speaking can be and sign language can even leave a bigger impact in the end. This speech should be really fun for me because facial expressions and gestures come naturally to