Speech Evaluation

 Aaron Rodriguez

Speech Evaluation

August 27, 2019

Cohort 21S

My speech was good as far as informational content but lacked a connection with the audience. My speech pattern had a lot of “so” and “um” to give time for thinking for me, but this created disconnect between the audience and me. I prepared a lot for the speech, but I need to work on speaking in front of a larger group of people to gain a comfortability with public speaking. This can be fixed through speaking more in class as well as finding opportunities in jobs or internships that require public speaking. I also noticed that I would say a sentence and then restructure it, mid-sentence which created less of a flow during the speech which may have confused the audience. In the future writing out my entire speech on a piece of paper may be beneficial so I can know exactly what I am going to say to avoid messing up and correcting myself in the middle of a sentence. This correction within the speech causes an unnecessary pause and makes it harder for me as the speaker to remember my place and make it hard for the audience to follow where my story is going This also allows me to plan out pauses, hand gestures and facial expressions so the audience can feel more of the emotion which I am trying to convey to them and they will be more engaged. There was also less flow in the speech by not exactly going into chronological order and provided fewer details in some areas and more detail in others. In the future the degree of detail will be spread out more evenly. Other things I need to work on is when transitioning from stories to personal communication pieces I need to find a way to bridge the gap between the two in a seamless way instead of jumping from section to section. The good parts were the stories that I would tell to keep the crowd engaged but the speech jumped around too much and lacked a good hook and impactful ending. Overall there is room for improvement which can be fixed with more scenarios of public speaking in the future.