Great Debaters Discussion Questions

This film focuses on being a confident and decisive person in life, through passionate and informed topics. Public speaking is the process of speaking to a group of people in a structured, deliberate manner intended to inform, influence, or entertain the listeners.¹ After watching this film it does strike a cord of wanting to be able to reach out to others and share my own opinions in a strong, confident manner. To inspire others on something I may be passionate about in life, to share a different aspect of life that others have not lived. I can't say exactly how much this film has impacted my views on public speaking although the film itself

The movie, The Great Debaters, takes place in the 1930s and explores the struggles of three students from Wiley College’s debate team. The first character introduced is the youngest student from the team, 14 year old, James Farmer Jr. He is an ambitious young man who strives to live up to his father’s expectations. James struggles with fear throughout the movie. He is sheltered and does not understand the severity of the racial conflict of the time. This trait is evident in the film in two key scenes. The first is when his family is out for a drive and his father accidently hits a white man’s pig. James’s father is very cautious during this interaction and James witnesses the incident from the car. This interaction has a major impact on James and gives him a greater understanding of the racial conflict. The second incident occurs when James is unsuccessful in his first debate. When given other opportunities to debate, he questions himself and fears failure. This fear plays a role in the debate team’s future competitions.

To summarize, the chapter Foundations of Public Speaking explained that public speaking is a liberal art seen as communication that involves ethics. It also teaches that

This paper will go over the three main goals I would like to achieve in my public speaking career. My first goal is to improve upon the structure of my speeches to ensure that the topics that I discuss are in an order that will make sense to the audience. My second main goal I have for improving my public speaking skills is to improve on my confidence before, during, and after my speech. Finally, my last goal is to raise my delivery skills when I am giving my speech to assure the audience that I am confident and that I am a credible person. Together, these goals will help improve my public speaking skills.

Public speaking is something that I enjoy. Being able to talk to many people at once and having them get to know a part of me is something I find interesting. With me enjoying speaking to people I found myself running for the Associated Student Body (ASB) president my senior year in high school, I was the secretary previous year. Knowing that with the position of being the president of the school I knew it came with having to be very social not only with my fellow ASB team but with the entire school! However, that was the least of my problems. I knew that in order for me to run for the position having a speech to present to the former ASB president and administration of the school was mandatory. Writing speeches have never been my cup of tea. I have always winged it, mixing my personality into the core of the message I was trying to deliver seemed to always work for me. I worked on the main points I was going to present, had a few lines that I knew I was going to follow but the rest I knew would come to me when the day came. It was the day for everyone running for office to have their presentation ready. Because I was running for the highest office that was available everyone who applied for a lower/ different position went first. Starting from the lowest office of being the freshman representation moving all the way up to the president. Because I was one of the last to present I had an advantage of

Character 1: I think taxes should be raised. We could use those taxes to pay off our national debt.

The capacity of speeches can be seen through its impact on human emotions and its capability to change the thought patterns of its audience. This is

Maya Angelou and Dave Chappelle talked about their experiences, some of which correspond to public speaking, as a result the public speaking textbook. They, being from different generations (as well as being different people, of course), have several different ideas and perspectives on the topic. Some of the public speaking topics they discussed were the harmfulness of language, adaptability, and idea generation.

Potty jokes, making fun of someone’s looks, calling each other losers. It’s not a kindergarten playground, it is the potential leaders of the free world, taking part in the highly publicized US presidential debates.

1. In the first reaction, when acetylene gas was produced, another product produced in the reaction remained in the dissolved in the water: Ca(OH)2, also known as calcium hydroxide. Before lab was finished, the last step was to measure the pH of the previously neutral water in which the acetylene gas was used to be produced. This time, the red litmus paper turned blue and the blue litmus paper remained blue, signifying that the water was basic. The reason for this is because of the second product, calcium hydroxide. Calcium hydroxide made the water basic because of its hydroxide ions: when it dissolved in water, the calcium hydroxide went through a dissociation reaction, isolating the hydroxide ions in the water, thus making the water basic.

Little kids are the worst. They’re undoubtedly cute, but they use that to their advantage to manipulate adults. Little kids are selfish, malicious, careless, and seek only instant gratification. Unfortunately, these characteristics are sometimes retained into the teenage years. Even adults, if they were never educated or disciplined, can preserve some of the negative characteristics of childhood. It takes external forces to civilize a child. It could be gentle scolding from parents or guidance from a church. Both of these scenarios certainly played a role in my own development, but the event that most contributed to my evolution to a better person was joining my school’s debate team. Joining debate, while perhaps not completely eliminating the child within me, has led me to pursue an enlightened version of myself who seeks education, acts morally, and promotes community.

There are several skills that come with being a great public. Such as, credibility, confidence, charisma etc. Being an effective speaker is not a skill someone is just born with, they must practice constantly in order to master their craft. On Saturday, March 5, 2016, I attended a lecture at Worchester room: upstairs in GUC above commons. The lecture was fascinating; the number of people that attended surprised me. It was the 1016 Multicultural Leadership Conference. The speaker was Sheree Satchell and the topic was capability vs. capacity.

Public speaking is more formal, the speaker is more prepared to talk, and the audience is not usually intended to talk back to the speaker in the middle of what they are saying.

Whenever any words related to “public speaking,” “presenting,” or “read this aloud” were said, anxious thoughts crept into my mind. The thought of those words sent my mind in a million different directions. Speaking and communicating have huge roles in everyday

This public speaking taught me many new concepts. The three I found to be the most important were speech anxiety, audience types, and the nature of attention. Learning about speech anxiety made me realize that feeling nervous at the beginning of a speech was normal and everyone feels it, but dysfunctional speech anxiety occurs when the anxiety prevents an individual from giving a speech effectively. Through learning about speech anxiety I learned the most common causes of the anxiety such as the ‘illusion of transparency’ which is the fear that the audience can tell that you’re nervous as well as different coping mechanisms such as visualizing success. Learning about this helped me examine myself and figure out my own sources of anxieties for public speaking. Another important concept I learned was the different types of audiences. I had always that that one audience was the same as another, but through this concept I realized that there were many different types of audiences. This concept helped me think about the different types of audiences I could have in the future and how to approach them. For instance, you would talk to a committed audience, who chose to be there and want to listen to