Public speaking has never been a painful experience for me. And, because public speaking is something I genuinely enjoy doing, I was excited to do speeches in class this year. I was also looking forward to hearing the speeches by the other students – because I knew they would all be very impressive, and I love listening to speeches. When it came to my topic, I had a pretty sound idea of what I wanted to talk about. Compassion. I came across Charter for Compassion, at the beginning of the school year, and was really inspired by the message being conveyed. Then, when we got to this unit in class, and found out that the topic of our speech must somehow connect to the mission statement, at that point, I knew it was meant to be. :-)
We did not have much time, but luckily, because it had been something I had been anticipating, and thinking about, I could begin writing straight away. At first, naturally, I wanted to include as many rhetorical devices as I could. But as the process continued, I found this effort was slowing me down significantly, and at that point, I decided to get my ideas down and then go back and make it “better”. I heard an interview on the radio by the man who writes speeches for president Obama. The man said, “tricks are not what make a speech - its first, what do I have to say and how can I move people with this?” and that made me forget the entire idea of techniques and just write. I actually found that afterwards, I was not missing any techniques. They had all incorporated themselves in naturally.
At first I wrote my speech with a lot of loaded diction, quotes, scientific facts, and big ideas…but then, after thinking about it some more, I decided to take a completely different approach. I re-wrote it with a much simpler image in mind. I hoped that a simpler speech would be easier for the audience to take in and in turn have a bigger impact. After writing it, I spent a lot of time practicing delivery, so that when it came time to present the speech to the class, I would be more confident. I knew that my speech did not have a fancy speech – so in order for it to be meaningful, I knew that delivery was important. I think speech is special because often it does not matter what someone is saying, as long as they present it well, people are convinced. That is what I was relying on for my speech. And that is why I spent so much time working on delivery.
After the class presentation, I was satisfied because I knew I did what I had practiced – I did the best I could do, but I was not expecting to be a finalist. I thought that my speech was too simple (although I had intentionally made it that way) and I was getting feedback that it was boring. So, the next day, when I found out, I was excited, surprised and then I decided I needed to do something special. In the finals, I started with a different anecdote from the speech I did in class. This was because I wanted to beginning to be powerful, for people to listen to what I was trying to convey in the speech. At the finals, I was nervous at the when I stood up to start, but I got over that feeling quickly, and tried to enjoy it – once again, do what I had practiced. To be honest, after making it to the final round, I felt like my mission had been accomplished. It did not occur to me that I could win. It didn’t occur to me until the end, after Ms. Vrba announced it.
