Presentations

I was very pleased with how my presentation went. I was surprisingly not as nervous as I had expected. I believe that this was because I felt that I was very well prepared to give my speech; most of it was memorized, and I got up extra early before class to rehearse it a few more time in front of the mirror. All of the feedback slips that I received, both from you and my peers was very positive. It was a great way to finish off a week of exams and projects before heading off for a nice week-long break.

Feedback

I appreciate the feedback I received both from you and my peers. I took your advice and changed the title of my speech to be more specific and used the original abstract one as a sub title. Mostly what my peers found were typos, but they seemed to feel that the tone of my speech was too sophisticated and the word choice too academic. Some felt that it would be better as an essay. However, I think that this is because they were reading a hard copy of the speech and so they felt it was an essay. To test my theory I gave my roommate a hard copy to ready and practiced delivering the speech to one of my friends. The roommate didn't think it should be an essay, but she did comment on the sophistication of the writing, but not in a negative manner. The friend loved the speech and found it easy to follow and the argument clear and compelling. I think that because it is a speech it is difficult to analyse unless it is presented auditorially. I have made changes to areas which I felt were legitimately too wordy and confusing, but I feel that the piece was meant to be a speech and works very well as one.

Speech 11/14

I have finished a fairly decent draft of my speech. I am very pleased that I chose this as my genera because I have found it to be very effective in allowing me to convey my ideas. I feel that I am able to construct more complex and in depth sentences that may otherwise be confusing because I am verbally delivering the speech so I can use pauses, word emphasis, and hand gestures to ensure that my audience is able to follow my though process. I have enjoyed this assignment most and feel that I excel in this forum of communication.

Chosen Genre

I have chosen to deliver a speech for my project. This was a fairly easy genre to research, especially because of the recent elections. I have decided there are two components to every speech, the actual content of the speech and how the speech is delivered. I watched a lot of u-tube videos of famous and non-famous speeches. I feel that the speaker is what really sells a speech to most audiences and he/she is responsible for leaving a positive memorable impression. Many speeches, such as the infamous "I Have a Dream" speech keep the audiences attention by rallying them and getting them excited and energised about the topic.
I also researched speeches given by Quakers and saw a drastic contrast. As I had predicted, Quakers focus much more on the content of their speeches and do not attempts to rally their audience. They may issue a plea for support, but primarily they provide information in such a way that the audience makes many of the conclusions for themselves. Quaker speeches are not at all "in your face" or aggressive. I plan to put a lot of effort into the constructions of my speech so that the content is appealing, but I will also try to be entertaining and animated, since the majority of my audience will be high schoolers. I have considered making a PowerPoint of pictures to keep my audience entertained and possibly passing out a general outline of the speech for them to follow along with.

Speech

I have completed my speech; yeah! Ironically as I read The Concept of Audience I found a lot of point which apply to my speech. It was interesting that the author so frequently compared the difficulties of writing to giving a speech to a live audience. I frequently feel that my writing is to directly addressed to a particular person. When I write, I write like I speak, so I envision a particular audience in my head as I write. I anticipate their reactions and develop counter arguments to them. However, the main flaw in my process, is that by having a particular audience in mind I only address their point of view and fail to think of others.
"You already know how to argue..... Life has taught you the elementary course." I found this introduction to be particularly interesting because my enter portfolio revolves around avoiding argument and finding alternative forms of discourse in which to convey one's point. It is interesting to try to write a persuasive paper about avoiding arguments without writing an argumentative essay. It would be pointless to write and argument about why arguing is wrong, therefore I believe one of the most difficult tasks I had writing my papers was tone. if the tone was argumentative, the entire essay would appear hypocritical.

Decision

I have finally decided. The medium I will implement will be a verbally delivered speech. The audience I will be addressing will be the national crowd of Quaker students and teachers which is drawn by the Quaker Youth Leadership Conference. And my topic will be the unification of Peace Educators under Quaker supervision and expansion of the implications and usage of Peace Education.

Initiating Action

Both of my previous papers have been calling for change within my community. For this assignment, however, I am focusing primarily on bringing about change, rather than explaining why the change needs to occur. I plan to appeal to Quakers to become more involved in Peace Education again and warn them against letting the movement be taken over and manipulated by private groups. The reason Peace Education is experiencing some current success is it is gaining recognition, however if private groups ruin the programs reputation by failing to teach properly there will be no future hope for the concept. I am considering two primary media genres, either a newspaper article, or a speech. I am leaning towards writing a speech to deliver at a large national Quaker Conference. My plan I to make an outline of what I want to say and then determine which genre will allow me to best express my points.

Essay Comments

I found the comments about my essay interesting, but they were not at all what I had expected. The one part that I did see coming was your concern that there were three parts to my essay, which I recognized and was worried might cause disjointedness. However, instead of trying to blend the sections together, you recommended reworking the first one so that it was of equal length. I suppose that it would make more sense to have three equal sections if I am going to maintain the separations. I personally would like to make more logical transitions to try to bring the reader along without confusing them each time I change topics. One of the risks I took in the paper was to come across rather forcefully which my question and answer segments, however you felt that this didn't give the reader enough time to process what I had said so I will need to rework these parts. Overall I'm still partial to the old system of inserting corrections directly into the text, but I did find the comments helpful.

I had an interesting weekend. I was prepared to take the bus back from JMU at 7:30p.m. but the bus ran into heavy traffic and was 2 hours late therefore I didn't leave until 9:30. This was manageable, however, only an hour into our trip the bus broke down and we were stranded on the side of 81. A long story short I got in after 1a.m. I am now considering writing an initiation action pamphlet to improve the Home Ride system.
Once I got back I looked over my articles regarding initiating action and decided that the ones I found most effective were the onces where main point was summarised in a picture. My articles are mostly about thinking and philosophical contemplation of the human species. My results were very different from many of my class members who seemed to have a large focus on environmental issues.