Self Reflection

This about you, what you want to accomplish with the presentation and how you are going to attain the goal of getting them “there.” Make sure your goal is an achievable challenge. At this point your goal becomes your big idea. This is where it becomes about the audience. You want the audience to change to your side basically, whether it is to your opinion, to buy a specific product, or to implement a new idea. The big idea is how you get them to change, how you get them from “here” to “there.” Most presentations look like a squiggly line, veering off in different direction with radical turns throughout. You need to make a straight line approach, the most effective path. Your objective is to effectively get the audience to change, you are not there to be interesting. Always remember to use the rule of three, it has worked in literature, comedy, and in memories. Simply put people are more likely to remember things in threes. For a presentation you must consolidate it down to three concepts.

Turn to page 114 of your textbook. Read “applying the power of public speaking” and Type your answer below.

However, I was very nervous giving the speech. This is a weakness that I noticed and that was mentioned by the peer evaluators. The most obvious sign of my nervousness was my repetitive use of the space-filler "mmmm"

While a good presentation can deliver the insights of a topic and allows the audience to clearly understand a textual topic in a visual and more memorable way, a bad presentation can also make the audience more confused for even the things that they already know. Unlike how most people think, presentation is not all about the quality of the contents of the presentation but it greatly depends on aspects such as presenter’s confidence, quality of slides, and speaker’s methods and preparation for that particular topic. The most complicated and boring topics can seem so interesting by the audience,

- What I did well during my speech was looking at my audience. I was always facing my audience and have a quick view to my PowerPoint. I believe I did well on these aspects because I wasn’t like the other students always looking at the PowerPoint and not even facing the audience. I know this is a public speaking class and the point is to talk to our audience while facing them.

Comment on the following points: presentation introduction, presentation closure, speaker knowledge about information, main points clear to audience, etc.

I ensured whilst I made my presentation that I spoke clearly and steadily. I have a tendency to talk quickly so I paid particular attention to controlling the speed of my voice. I also ensured I maintained eye contact with my audience and tried not to focus just on one individual.

The biggest adversity I have faced in my life was when I immigrate to the United States. It was entirely a different culture, people and language here. Since I was born and raised in India, where English is not a primary language; it was the toughest challenge for me to comprehend completely what people say here in America. Which became a hurdle in my path of getting a job in beginning. However, my determination to complete my goal for higher education, gave me the will to manage and overcome all the obstacles in United States. I observed things intimately and adapted new environment very well. I tried to communicate in English as much as I could to make myself proficient in it. I’ve driven hard in learning new language in order to achieve

Similar to Tan’s mother, I realized my limitations to having a fluent conversation with people I communicate with and I made a huge effort to attend English reading class and to frequently visit the writing center to reduce my accent limitations, so that I can be able to fluently interact with people in the school and my work place, and this has greatly helped me.

I visited my Rheumatology department and gathered local information, leaflets and booklets. I also spoke with my pharmacy department re side effects of medication and was given a BNF to refer to. Having relevant, meaningful and factual content was important to me. Once I had completed my research and gathered my evidence, I tried put my presentation together. It was time to call for the help of my daughter, who as very patient with me. Choosing the right colour back ground, font colour, use of colour images to make it more interesting, and to aid the understanding of Lupus and my case study, was not an easy task. Proving to be worthwhile as a result, I received a high grade. I became so worried about forgetting to say certain pieces of information that I wrote it all on the slide. My feedback made me aware that this just made them too busy and resulted in the size to small, hence making it hard for my audience to read them. To maintain my audience’s attention and stop looking them at me, I decided to hand out some models of hips, 3 in total, showing a healthy hip, degeneration of a hip and a hip replacement. Finally, my presentation was ready! Now for the delivery, having read the six steps to becoming an effective presenter by University of Leicester it still didn’t help with me being so nervous.

The second presentation to be analysed is an informative speech delivered by a student named Vicky. Vicky attended her speech wearing appropriate attire for her audience. In my opinion, I think she was dressed appropriately, but she should have dressed in a server attire to enhance the mood of her speech. One of Vicky’s flaws in her presentation was her body language. Although she obtained good eye contact with her audience, she had some difficulties with her gestures and movements that could give off the wrong impression to her audience, such as using too many gestures with her hands and she often swayed while she was talking. These gestures could portray that she was nervous. Another fault she illustrated was her stance in which her hip was

Take a moment and think about this lesson’s learning objective. What skills will you need to be successful? Consider presentations you’ve seen in the past. How does a speaker demonstrate that he or she is aware of the audience? How does a speaker use volume for effect? Should volume vary to emphasize a point? How

My weakness in this area is not having the confidence level to present my work publicly. The nerves starts to kick me. I begin to choke on my words and have shaky voice. I also mispronounce my words often and I don’t make eye contact with the crowd.

Neither was I able to get their points, nor could they understand me. The reasons were that my Turkish English teachers are not the experts in pronunciation and there is no class focusing on speaking at state schools in Turkey. An experiment was performed by Major et al. about speaking and listening problems for international people. Four groups of one hundred listeners, whose native languages were Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and American English, heard brief lectures presented in English by speakers with different native languages and answered questions based on the lectures. The results indicated that both native and nonnative listeners scored significantly lower on listening comprehension tests when they listened to nonnative speakers of English, and Chinese group scored significantly lower when listening to speakers who shared their native language. Only Spanish group did well when they listened to their native speaker (174). This experiment showed that learning English from a nonnative speaker may cause troubles in both listening and speaking parts of English. Additionally, I lacked of ability on word choice for the first couple of months in the USA. For example, I was using adjective “too” for positive circumstances ” instead of “very” or “so”, and I used to say “according to me” instead of “in my

In my academic and professional life I have taken presentation for several times, but sometimes I felt somewhere I am going wrong when I came across the unsatisfied audience. Though I made sure that I know about the subject very well still I cannot engage my audience fully. Just after this class I realised my mistake, even though I prepared well for the presentation I made a mistake by keeping the presentation more text oriented instead of