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It's time to give your first speech, your introduction speech
and the purpose is to give you a first experience talking in front of an audience. Your grade
is not important on this one - it doesn't count for hardly anything. It's just to give
you more comfort and more opportunities to get up and talk. I want you to introduce yourself
to me, and there are a couple of goals I want you to work on. First of all, varied eye contact,
and second, conversational delivery. But before I talk about those, let's look
at the speech itself. You are going to introduce yourself to me and your classmates. Tell us
your name, your major, why you majored in that. And then you can pick a few extracurricular
activites or family, hobbies or favorites to talk about. Tell us anything you want to
say about yourself. The other thing I want you to do is bring an item from home that
represent you and tell us a little bit about it. So you will need a prop to use for this
speech. It can be anything you want, but don't bring your cell phone. That's way to easy.
Some people bring a picture of their family or a surf board. One time a guy brought a
big piece of his truck. Bring whatever you feel like represent you, and you'd like to
talk about. Let's look at eye contact and how you can
achieve conversational delivery. First eye contact...One thing you don't want to do,
is don't look over the audience's heads. If I was demonstrating this for you, you could
see that it looks really strange. It may look fine in a big auditorium, but for a classroom
situation, it looks weird. Next, sometimes the speaker will pick a person
in the audience and deliver their speech to that person. Often times that person is me,
and it makes me feel uncomfortable. If it's someone else, it makes that person feel uncomfortable
(laughing). You want to look around at various people. You don't want to look at the same
person the whole time you're talking. The osciallating robot head....you know how
some fans rotate back and forth, and back and forth? Sometimes people try to do that
with their heads. Besides looking strange, and potentially giving you a crick in the
neck, it's not natural. So what you DO want to do is make varied eye
contact. You will have your notes in your hand. I'll talk more about your notes in a
second. But you will look down at your notes for a few seconds, look up - pick a person
in the audience, and make eye contact with them for one or two seconds. Then look at
someone else for one or two seconds...somebody else for one or two seconds...Then look back
at your notes as needed. You don't have to have prolonged eye contact with anybody. Just
moving your eyes around the room and focusing on someone for a few seconds at a time is
sufficient. The other thing about eye contact on a topic like this is you KNOW yourself.
You're introducing yourself and you are not going to have to have your eyes glued to your
notes. Your notes are just a guideline that will help you remember what you wanted to
say about yourself. Keep them to bullet points or brief ideas. Which leads me to my next
goal: conversational delivery. Conversational deliver: you want it to feel
like you're just talking to a group of friends, or talking to a few people --not like you're
giving a formal speech. So how do you achieve conversational delivery? First of all I DO
NOT want you to write out your speech word for word. I don't want you to come in with
a whole paragraph or page filled solid with the information, and then get up and read
it. That's not "speech." That's reading an English paper aloud to the class. You're going
to have an outline. And this will be your first time putting together an outline. You
don't even have to turn it in. It's just for you. But it's going to be key words and phrases.
So maybe I want to tell my audience that I'm an Astros fan, and we travel around to see
ballparks. I would probably list the ballparks seen on my piece of paper because I will never
remember them. I would jot down that information. Or maybe I want to talk about my favorite
movie - The Godfather. I would write The Godfather down so I'd remember to talk about that movie
when I talk about my favorites. So just brief information to remind you of what you want
to say. You don't have to have complete sentences or a lot of detail. Which leads me to the
next one. It's ok to have a complete sentence here or
there, but for the most part avoid them. Because again you don't want to read it outloud. Now,
here's the trick on this. You will use key words and phrases, but you will have practiced
this speech outloud before you actually do it in front of an audience. This is **really**
important. Think about if you've ever played sports, or if you've ever been in a choir
or a band. Any type of event where you have to perform in front of a group. When you stand
up there to run that football play or to sing that song with your choir, that's not the
first time you've done it when you get on a stage to actually do it for an audience.
You have done it tons of times before then. And the same things applies for a speech.
Don't wait until it's the day of the speech, and you stand up there to say it for the first
time. Practice it out loud ahead of time. Because you'll have been practicing off of
those key words and phrases, you're going to get comfortable with how you're going to
say it. But it's also going to come out how you really talk. That's the goal of conversational
delivery. I don't want this to sound stiff and formal. I want this to sound like the
way that you talk. We write differently than we talk. It's very important to...it's called
extemporaneous speaking. To play off of your notes in a conversational tone without having
it written out in paragraph format. For this speech there's nothing actually to
turn in to me. If you're recording it, you'll be submitting your video. If you're doing
it in person you'll come to the location at the appointed time and you'll get up and do
your speech. Make sure your notes are legible - that you can actually read them. You can
type them if you want. You can highlight things. You can write them in felt tip markers in
20 different colors if you like that. It doesn't matter to me because I'm not even going to
see it. So good luck and I look forward to meeting
all of you and hearing your introduction speeches.