Discussion # 1 - 9/29

Self Evaluation of Speech I

The first speech of this course was to be a demonstrative speech lasting about 4 to 5 minutes in length. I chose to do my speech on the preparation of Guacamole (a topic very close to my heart). Because I like cooking, I was excited to research this topic and present it to the class. I decided my main points would include the history of Guacamole, the recipe and preparation of it, and nutrition info about it.

The research portion of my speech went extremely well. Contrary to what I thought, I was able to find many resources that had information about Guacamole. I knew it would be easy to find Guacamole recipes, but I thought there would be no historical info available. Pleasantly, I was wrong and found a great deal of background info just on the internet.

Writing up the outline (with a complete intro and conclusion) was also a quick and easy process. I realized it's easier to make outlines if there is an abundance of information. It's always better to have too much info that needs to be trimmed, rather than have too less and try to pad the speech with nonsense.

The day of the speech, I was a little nervous but I often feel those butterflies just before speeches and I usually calm myself down as I'm saying the first couple sentences of my intro. This was also my first demonstrative speech, so I was a little nervous about having to prepare Guacamole and do it within a certain time limit. All in all, I felt that my speech might have been a little rushed and my voice stuttered a little bit. This generally doesn't happen, so I was rather surprised when I watched the video and saw how nervous I really looked. I don't know if the audience thought I was very nervous, because none of my peer evaluations seemed to point that out. However, I tend to indulge myself in the spotlight effect so it could be a result of that too. I think I maintained good eye contact, spoke clearly, and had a well-organized speech to present. I could have improved on practicing my actual demonstration a few more times to calm myself down.