Reflection #1

Lawrence Hedvat

STC 135

9/14/15

Reflection #1

I wanted to start this post off by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed this assignment. I feel that I know my classmates much better now after having heard all of their speeches and reading their blog posts and I hope that they feel that they have gotten to know me better as well.

Introducing myself to the class through writing was very different from introducing myself to the class through written word. There are many obvious reasons that they are extremely different. For one when you are sitting at a computer typing up a blog about yourself there aren’t 30 pairs of eyes looking at you, which can make writing about yourself a lot less stressful than speaking in front of a live audience about yourself. On the other hand when you are speaking in front of an audience it is possible to read your audience. Reading the audience can be done through their reactions to things you have done or said, examples of this can be facial expressions, and other body language. This way you can tell if the audience is engaged in the topic you are presenting to them. For example I felt that towards the end of my presentation I was beginning to lose my audience. So I cut out the part of my speech that talked about my favorite type of music and proceeded to my concluding thoughts. Where as in my blog post the part about my favorite music is still there. I noticed that John McWhorter who wrote an article and had a TED talk on the subject of texting did the same thing I just mentioned. Leaving out parts of his article during the speech.

One thing I noticed McWhorter does well when public speaking, is keeping the audience engaged through his hand movements. I feel that this is what I struggled with the most during my presentation. In the video of me presenting, you can see me do many of the actions that Professor Hunt described as negative in his presentation. For example the first thing I did when I walked up to the podium was give it the death grip which happens to be one of Professor Hunts favorite worst things you can do with your hands during a speech. I also continuously shifted my weight from one side to the other and moved my feet a lot. I think that I felt awkward not moving my hands at all during the presentation so I began to do some of the most distracting things with my hands possible, such as pull my shorts up a total of about 50 times meanwhile they hadn’t moved an inch the whole presentation. All in all it was a great learning experience and I hope to continue growing as a public speaker so hopefully when it really counts I will look like less of an amateur in front of my colleagues.