Public speaking? No thanks.

In the past, prior to this class, my public speaking experience were reading bullets from powerpoints. I had trouble getting up in front of the class. And once I did, I would not look at my audience, stutter, sweat, and get very twitchy. And although this is still the case, I have graduated from reading directly off of powerpoints to notecards and next week, my first presentation by memory. I don't have many experiences to reflect on objectively. I do, however, have objective results for my civic artifact speech, the scores I received for each category in the rubric.

For the civic artifact speech, I earned a majority of points in the categories of content and organization. I lost a majority of points for my lackluster delivery. I lost points because I had a quiet voice and made little-to-no eye contact. This is a general theme based on the way I felt during my previous presentations. To correct for my quiet voice I can wear a lapel mic (my disability prevents me from having a particularly loud voice). The eye-contact deficiency needs some serious attention, though.

I have always had issues making eye-contact with people. Something about looking into someone's eyes is uncomfortable for me. The easiest way I can think of to improve this is to have staring contests with anybody I remotely know or don't know. Hey stranger on the bus, let's gaze into eachother's eyes. Hey you over there, I want to peer into your soul....until it gets uncomfortable. But, in all seriousness, I could have staring contests with my family. I would make the goal of these contests to keep eye contact for increasing lengths of time. If I can go from 30 seconds to 1 minute with my family I can probably do 5-10 seconds per audience member. Another, more practical way to improve my eye-contact is to practice my speech in front of an audience of roughly sketched faces. I would spend time scanning the "crowd" picking a person for 5-10 seconds and then scan and pick another person.

My content and organization for this presentation were relative strengths of mine. Research and synthesis are much easier for me than standing up in front of people and talking. I have a strong admiration to those who are masters at the presentation. I am not one, but I am fairly certain I can improve.