CMST60 — Public Speaking
Something that is particularly interesting about a public speaking course is that, when a student is required to give a speech, he is standing in front of totally random people–meaning that the audience has no idea who the speaker is or what he is planning to talk about. This made the class much more challenging for me because no assumptions could be made about the audience’s ability to understand any finer details about a chosen subject. A certain number of educational points covering fundamental ideas had to be worked into each presentation, which is really quite unreasonable when you only have five minutes to talk.
At a typical speech an audience comes to an event with purposes and reasons: they know why they are there, which means that the speaker can in return make a number of expectations about her audience. If these natural boundaries are in place, which is almost always the case, then getting up in front of a group of people and articulating a series of ideas and points is a much more natural process. However, in a classroom no such boundaries exist, which produces artificial challenges for the speaker that would otherwise not exist. In your typical classroom scenario the speaker is someone who is trying to learn how to stand up in front of others, speak with coherence, and somehow not become frozen by the extreme discomfort brought on by a bewilderment which is endowed by the inherent ridiculousness of her situation: a complete lack of context. This imposition on both the speaker and her audience produces a rather serious challenge for everyone in the class who is trying to learn how to effectively deliver a speech, which in turn produces a severe educational contradiction.
Consider this: If a person went to the grocery store and began pontificating about the appropriate purchasable ripeness of a Chiquita banana to a bunch of strangers, at least some of the people there would have a clue as to what was being discussed. Some might even find genuine interest in what is being shared because they, too, have at times wondered about such things. The point is that there would be a certain degree of both natural familiarity and natural context granted to the speech-giver to support his or her efforts which would serve to propel the speech forward. Also, until security came along to haul the person out of the store (without said ripened bananas), the amount of learning and experience gained would in most cases be much greater than an awkward attempt to deliver the same speech to an entirely random assortment of people in a classroom. The best that can be offered by school is an artificial and contrived context, a context in which many members of the audience do not buy their own bananas and thus have no idea of the amount of care, consideration and consternation that can go into such a decision. As a direct result of this, any attempts to effectively communicate such ideas to an expectedly large percentage of the audience is entirely without reason or purpose. It is akin to a desperate attempt to sell a car without wheels to a someone who doesn’t even know how to drive. Why would you even bother to try?
Speeches
Miss Piggy Speech
Informative Speech Preparation Outline
Informative Speech Talking Outline
Informative Speech Slides
Persuasive Speech Preparation Outline
Persuasive Speech Talking Outline
Persuasive Speech Slides
Persuasive Speech Handout
PowerPoint Speech Preparation Outline
PowerPoint Speech Slides