Speech III – Combat Unemployment!

Gosh, Speech III for me was terrible. Absolutely horrific.

Speech prep was fairly easy. Looking up all those resources and reading that much was tough on top of all my other classes, but each night, I read a little bit and I took notes. I based my visual around my notes instead of around my speech.

My audience was the US Department of Commerce, and I had three audiences within that one audience. There were people within the Department looking for progressive change, people in the Department who didn't want responsibility and change, and the "it's not my problem" group. Obviously, I assumed that the people who were looking for progressive change would be the most educated (or at least have a well-rounded education) about civil matters as well as government policies. Therefore, the "who cares" group would need to be educated the most, and THOSE were the people I wanted to win over.

I thought my speech was terrible. I was prepared, I had note cards, I had my visual, I had everything. But for some reason, all of the things I had been thinking about saying when I got up there went right out of my head, and my notes weren't helping. Who can decipher "1913 DoC X, brd :)" when they're terrified? I don't know why I got so nervous, because I was okay during Speech I, and even better during Speech II. Then, I wanted to kick myself. I speak English, for crying out loud!!! Why could I only think "l'effondrement" and "la ruine"?!? I completely blanked out after I realized that I said the Lehman Bros closed. They didn't close, they just went broke and fired the people who do all the real work! And, of course, when I blanked on the English, I panicked. Panicked BIG TIME! I should have just kept going, but I'm a perfectionist, so I wanted to correct myself… I stumbled my way through the presentation after that… It was just ridiculous…

Something that a few people picked up on in there evaluations was that minority populations are the ones hit hardest by unemployment. I guess its a good thing to bring a feminist twist to such an open-minded audience. I definitely could have used more audience interaction and eye contact. I'm just not sure how to create audience interactions with such a formal audience. It's going to be even more difficult for Speech IV because my primary audience is about as formal as an American audience gets (President, Senate, and Congress), and I still have to engage my secondary audiences on top of all that. What fun...

When I do Speech IV, I'm definitely going to write the whole thing out and read it over and over again. I wrote it out word for word for Speech I and Speech II, and I was fine. Even if I don't use the paper during my speech, it helps me to write things out and memorize them like they're lines in a musical. I'm always on stage, singing, dancing, acting…whatever. And knowing my lines is reassuring, because even if I forget a specific line, I can always improvise around it because I know the general idea of the line like the back of my hand… I really think that's what I'm going to do for Speech IV. Just memorize my lines… And maybe not use a visual… I was really distracted by my visual for some reason. I just don't think it worked well. The visual could have stood on its own and given my speech for me, it was all there. But during the speech, the clicking and having to look at the graphs, it drove me nuts. Maybe just pictures or something very, very simple for Speech IV, if anything at all.