Brainstorming:
My topic for my speech will be about strategies for communicating effectively and clearly in COVID. I think connecting with my audience will be rather easy just because every single person in the world was affected by COVID-19 and I’m sure everyone also struggled with communicating during it. Being someone who worked during COVID-19 and also been a student I have been able to experience trying to communicate in an academic/business setting as well as a social/personal setting. Through this, I learned
I selected this topic because this is something that I have thought about a lot and think have some really good points. This is also something that I think has not been talked about enough but is a big issue. Myself, along with I am sure millions of people, all struggled with communication during this time, and until thinking about it now I realize we weren’t really given any tools to help us with this. So after thinking about this I realized that I had a lot to say and a lot of ideas that I genuinely think would help others and also help them realize that they’re not the only ones going through this.
Outlines:
This pandemic is something that is affecting our entire world, one thing I think is the most important to establish the difference between academic and personal world. The communication between the two is different so we have to relearn the two??
- Talk about the differences between how we used to communicate academic work/ social personal
- Talking in an academic work setting
- Work, I worked as a cashier in a small beach town during the summer learning to talk to strangers, being more confident
Talking to teachers about assignments, being transparent with feelings and questions
- Talking in social setting
Being able to express yourself thoughts being turned into the only way to talk
- COVID-19 first college class we were kind of guinea pigs
Masks, technology with teachers, zoom (turned into a security blanket) we were not the only ones who struggled
- COVID made it easier to hide behind a screen, made it harder to learn how to ask questions/be more confident I push myself to try and do as much as I can in person, meetings with teachers + people
- Learning was hard, teaching myself school/classes take advantage of resources like tutoring
Speech Outline
Intro: Hi, I’m going to be talking about strategies on how to communicate more effectively during covid. This pandemic is something that is affecting our entire world, one thing I think is the most important to establish the difference between communicating in a professional and communicating in a academic/social/personal world.
- Talk about the differences between how we used to communicate academic work/ social personal
- Talking in an work setting for example,
- Work, I worked as a cashier in a small beach town during the summer learning to talk to strangers, masks, plexyglass – solution is being more confident in asking for people to repeat themselves
- Masks, technology with teachers, zoom (turned into a security blanket) we were not the only ones who struggled
Talking to teachers about assignments, being transparent with feelings and questions and hardships
- Learning was hard, teaching myself school/classes take advantage of resources like tutoring
- COVID-19 first college 2024 class we were kind of guinea pigs
- Talking in social setting
- Being able to express yourself thoughts being turned into the only way to talk
- COVID made it easier to hide behind a screen, made it harder to learn how to ask questions/be more confident I push myself to try and do as much as I can in person, meetings with teachers + people
I think that the best advice that I gave to a peer was to try and get her points organized. They were very good ideas and points that she had but they didn’t flow very well together. She also kept losing her spot while presenting to us in a group which ultimately made her start using filler words like um. Losing your place to me too just makes me even more nervous so being more organized would help with that.
I think this was the best advice I gave because after giving her that advice and her being able to revise the speech the difference was day and night just in the dry run alone. Her points flowed so much better, she didn’t seem nearly as nervous and she hardly lost her place.
The best advice I got from a peer was probably to expand on topics and points more and give more solutions to the problems I was stating. I had some really good ideas but not much detail in them which led to them being kind of confusing. I was also talking about my struggles with communicating during COVID but didn’t exactly give solutions which was pretty much the whole point of speech.
This was their best advice to me because this really helped me construct my speech to be so much better and actually educational like it was supposed to be. I went back, added more detail to my points and make it a little more personal which lead me to being able to connect with my audience better. I also added real solutions to my problems I was presenting which gave my speech the ability to get my points across and help people.
Journal 7 After our dry run on Tuesday I was able to get a lot and also give feedback and it helped me realize some major things in my speech that I could fix. Initially, I had some really good ideas and points but they were unorganized and I didn’t explain them the best I could. This left people confused because I didn’t give the context I needed, and ultimately helped me change my speech around and had it flow so much better. Something else that someone pointed out that was very helpful was that I was talking about all these issues but not talking about the solutions and that was something I am focused on fixing. This also adds time to my speech that was only 2:28 the first time. Another thing that was pointed out to me was to be more conscious of the filler words and to fix my eye contact. I realized that when I get nervous I tend to use them and I also tend to avoid making eye contact. This dry run really helped because all of us were going through this fear of public speaking together. To further enhance my speech I focused on adding more detail and giving it a better structure. This will give my audience more context and kind of make it personal which also helps the audience relate back and be more engaged. The last thing I need to do is just add an intro and conclusion.
Journal 8 Before presenting our speeches I couldn’t be more nervous, hands sweating, a shaky voice the whole nine yards. After presenting it I realized that I really just worked myself up and it was not even close to how bad I thought it was going to be. I was SO relieved after saying my last word but I feel that this project really helped me out. As I said before I would get super nervous but after listening to these other speeches talking about self confidence and self advocacy, it really resonated with me. I feel the speeches delivered in our class were mature and really well constructed and in that they gave me really good advice like tips on how to self advocate or stay organized in school. One thing that I learned from the project as a whole that helped me was that most of the time if I’m going through something, if I’m nervous, whatever it may be I’m usually not the only one going through it and that gives me a sense of security and confidence.
Journal 10 After delivering my speech today and being able to reflect on the entirety of this project I think it was well constructed and the only scary or “bad” part was delivering the speech because of the nerves. I initially thought that I wanted to do my speech about the academic topic but later I decided that I wanted to write about communication during COVID. I did that because I felt that I had a better understanding of that. During the process I felt it was super helpful having my peers give me feedback, they gave me really good points that later allowed me to reconstruct my speech to flow nicely and made sure my points were understood. Delivering the speech itself was nerve racking but once I saw my peers do it and reminded myself that I’m not the only one having to do this I was able to overcome and deliver a decent speech. This project taught me that public speaking is not as easy as it seems, and helped me build those skills and confidence at a smaller scale. In future projects I now know that feedback and dry runs were super helpful in leading me to be able to present and construct this project.
