Live, Love Public Speaking!

Speaking in front of people may be nerve racking at first.  However, it is always very important that when speaking in public, it is necessary for you to project your voice, make eye contact, and avoid movement while speaking.  

First off, it is crucial to project your voice.  When you aren't loud, people will have a tough time trying to understand you.  When you project you voice, everyone will have a clear understanding of what you are saying to them.  Second, making eye contact with the audience is  important.  When you make eye contact with the crowd, it shows you have prepared well for the presentation you are giving.  Additionally, it shows your audience that you are confident about what you are saying. Lastly, it is essential to avoid movement while speaking.  A force of habit for many people when they are speaking in front of other is swaying from side to side.  This is a result of being nervous of publicly speaking.  Another common example is hand gestures.  Lots of people have a nervous habit of moving their hands while giving a speech.  From the audiences point of view, when seeing the speaker move, it could make the person giving the speech seem unprepared.  Also, it distracts the audience. Overall, there are many tips to give to be a good public speaker, but these are the three most important.

Working on all three of these elements would be my goal and/or the specific things I could work on over the course of this public speaking class.  After giving my food speech and introduction to my monologue, my classmates agreed that the volume of my voice could have been a little bit louder.  Hearing myself talk, I, too, noticed that as I continued to read my monologue, my voice got quieter.  After these two short presentations, my classmates also thought that I could make more eye contact.  Most of the time I was reading what I had wrote on my iPad.  I hope by the end of this class, I will develop strategies to help me make more eye contact whether it be memorizing my lines or being able to read ahead.  Finally, moving wasn't much of an issue for me in these presentations.  Yet, I was holding my iPad in my hands when giving the last two quick speeches.  I fear that when I don't have my iPad in my hands, I will have a habit to move them.  

Overall, projecting your voice, making eye contact, and avoiding movement when speaking will make for a very successful performance.  Before I began taking this class, I was never a great public speaker.  I despised class powerpoint presentations.  I didn't even like reading aloud a section of text during a class read aloud.  Still, I am grasping onto the idea and concept of public speaking.  It is very difficult to change the way you talk to other.  But, by the end of this class, I hope to become a better speaker in general, but also hope to become better at these specific aspects of public speaking.