I found the speech buddy videos and the text particularly useful this week. I liked learning about the different types of supporting materials because I had never really given them much thought before. In all of my years of essay writing, it's always get your thesis, find your main points, find the supporting details - examples, quotes, statistics - apply to main points, bring points back home to the thesis, and conclude. Wham! Bam! Thank you Ma'am. ( Okay, I wish that my essay writing was that clean cut, but essentially that's how it works, just without the weeks of procrastination and then the week of free writing as I desperately try to get out of my stress-induced writer's block.) What I liked about Chapter Seven was the idea of organizing my supporting materials in order to appeal to the audience in a variety of ways. I liked learning about methods that will elicit emotional responses vs. logical connections. It seems to me that if you hit all of these points and stimulate the emotional and logical facets of your audience in an efficient manner, then you can potentially have the audience in the palm of your hand. Try not to go mad with power now...
Chapter 8 appealed to me because I am hopelessly busy, but I dream of one day being perfectly organized. I had never thought of different patterns of organization before. I think that mainly I had been using chronological and topical methods in previous academic jaunts. I am looking forward to incorporating new methods into future works. I keep having this sneaking suspicion that this whole public speaking class is going to improve my English and writing skills as well. Weird.
Also, if anyone want to dummy for a joint lock for my demonstration speech, do let me know. It will be fun! I promise!
I love to write. Other than being in school and writing papers I just write, with no thought to organization or purpose. I know those things are there, I just don't think about it. So reading Chapter 7 and 8 was very interesting for me also. Chapter 7 did give good advice for balancing or even choosing to appeal on a more emotional or logical level with your audience depending on your goal. Chapter 8 was a lot more interesting to me and more helpful with the current speech we are writing. I usually just write, I do not sit down and write out an outline first. For this class thats all we do, and I think its a lot harder! I would love to be more organized with writing as well. I have no doubt that this class will help you with your writing. Any challenge or new way of doing something you like to do is helpful.
ReplyDeleteI liked your points for chapter seven and chapter eight. They took some pretty complex ideas and show pretty easy ways for us to get organized and structured. I tend to just think my audience is going to love what I have to say, might be an ego thing, and so I don't give to much thought on how they will perceive it, but after watching this I think I will be able to make a more enjoyable speech for everyone. I am also pretty unorganized, actually so much I just tell people I thrive in chaos, which might be true, but its really just because I couldn't organize to save my life. The tips they give that you mentioned I think will help out and structure the speech's for us.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I had never really known of these different outline types. It would have made essays in my English 1A class a lot easier! It was especially nice how the book gave a table to summarize each outline type to contrast and compare them and then summarized it again in the videos. I also never really thought of the different supporting materials and what each one did, with each one having its own pros and cons for uses in a speech. I liked how the book brought up the idea to use a mix of several of each type to achieve a good balance in a speech, as compared to only using one type which would not affect as much of the audience that one would be speaking to.
ReplyDelete