A Self-Reflection on a Reflection on Navigation

I remembered from the Civic Artifact Speech there were certain areas I wanted to cover and practice for this talk, one of which was eye-contact. The activity in class where I had to read out the lyrics of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody definitely helped with focusing where my eyes went. For the content of my speech, I went over all the facts and times in my head in order until I felt I could recall all the information comfortably. I would look over my essay and add interesting tid-bits into my essay and incorporate those into my talk. I wanted to avoid the "valley of awkwardness" I mentioned in a previous blog post and I think I actually did overcome it. I managed to go through all my information rather smoothly and cover all of my important points within five and a half minutes.

I would benefit more for future talks if I practiced more in front of live audiences and not just repeated the talk in my head. I think in hindsight I should have also practiced my talk with my visuals and get more comfortable with them. In the future, I should work more on presenting in the setting my talks/speeches will be in, and put myself in a "natural" environment.

Performance-wise, I'd say I did pretty well, but there could always be room from improvement! The eye-contact thing was all over the place and I never made steady eye-contact, but it was better than my last presentation, it think. I had a good, conversational tone of voice that was good for this talk, and though I stuttered and repeated some phrases, I'd give myself a good overall grade on my presentation. Again, I'd like to work on the eye contact in the future as well as practicing in front of an audience more so that I become comfortable with speaking and hopefully that would remove the stuttering. I'm glad that all of my comedic bits got laughs out of the audience, and I might decide to work on my delivery on those parts more in the future too.

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Rhetoric and Civic Life | Annabelle Yi

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