A Few New Discoveries

Hello Everyone!

How was your week? How was school? Work? Play? My week consisted of going to school, going to volleyball practice, doing homework, eating, and most importantly, sleeping! ;)

Look, I promised you guys that if I found out why I'm blogging my 'Public Speaking' class, I would tell you. My teacher wrote down the answer on my rubric and even brought it up in class. She says, "The skills you will practice in written communication (blogging) will carry over to oral communication and performance." This means that if I talk well through my blog, I'll soon become a better public speaker. (Or so she says).

This week, I will teach you guys some of the things that I learned during the my Public Speaking classes. By the end of the this, maybe I'll interest you to take a speaking class yourself.

First, we learned about articulation and diction, which is the way a speaker would pronounce the words so the listeners could understand them well. This would be done by making sure that certain letters, like t, are pronounced well. This is important because we've all listened to that one teacher that is never understandable. Because you can never understand the teacher, learning is harder in that subject, as well as your interest in that subject goes down.

Another important pair is audience and purpose. Audience is who you're are speaking to, and purpose is why you're speaking to them. These two concepts go hand-in-hand because your speech could change based who and why you're speaking. We did this activity in class one day where we had to write tow paragraphs. One to our parents trying to convince them to let us go on a school trip to Puerto Rico, and a second trying to convince your best friend to go on the same trip. We learned that our language was really different. When it was our parents, we were formal and stated reasons such as, 'educational' and 'constant supervision' while when we were talk to our friends, we were much more casual and said reasons such as 'lots of fun' and 'no parents.'

A third group of important terms include projection and delivery. These words talk about how you present your speech. Projection is making sure that you're facing the audience with good posture to make sure that the guy in the last row can hear you're words clearly. Delivery is if you make an accent or the expressions on your face or where your arms and legs. Both of these things are so important because if they are done wrong can be distracting to the audience.

I hope you learned something through this preview to public speaking. As many people know, public speaking is a skill that everyone should master because it is necessary in all occupations. From doctors, to truck drivers, everyone needs to speak. So next you have a choice, take the public speaking class. . . You never know what you might learn!