I am not the public speaker that I would like to be, but I would like to fix that. It’s hard for me to identity exactly what my problem is because I usually can blame different things after each speech. One factor is that I always have the tendency to be nervous, but the results of that nervousness vary. Mostly that nervousness makes me lose sight of my sense of time. My tendency is to deliver the message with great rapidity. So to counter that rapidness of speech, I find myself slowing down—and that’s exactly what I did last week during my how-to speech. In my notes, I told myself to be confident. I consciously had more confidence in this speech than my prior one, which turned out for the better in that regard. Yet this last speech was far from perfect.

When I finished giving my speech, the professor told me that it was the longest speech that he’d ever heard on how to change a light bulb. To me, I thought that the comment was a little rude, given that the speech only seemed about three minutes, but after watching the video I realized that the speech was closer to five minutes. I had gone over sixty percent of what the length of the speech was suppose to be. But even worse, it was both boring and embarrassing to watch. I subjected Wendy to it and she told me that I talked too slow and was boring. Well, now I have another area in which I need to improve. While I don’t think that I will be an expert speaker by the end of this course, I do believe that I’ll be a bit better.