Description
- Purpose
This is your first formal speech. You’ll need to plan, organize, and deliver a 3-4 minute narrative speech. The speech will illustrate to the audience the?importance of a lesson learned, a significant life moment, or a moral the audience can connect with. You’ll also consider your personal anxieties about public speaking and begin developing strategies for overcoming them.Assignment Outcome
Deliver a 3-4-minute speech telling a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, or deliver a 3-4 minute speech telling about an experience where three important things were learned - Steps for Completing the Task
Steps for Completing the TaskStep 1: Select Your Topic- Choose a personal narrative that is appropriate for this audience and setting (college classroom, peers & instructor).
- Start by thinking about why the audience might find the point of your story or experience important.
- Review the following possible topics:
- A Childhood Event – Think of an experience when you learned something for the first time or when you realized how important someone was for you.
- Achieving a Goal – Think about a particularly meaningful achievement in your life. This could be something as achieving a good grade on a difficult assignment, or this could be something with more long-lasting effects, like getting the job you desired or getting into the best school to which you applied.
- A Failure – Think about a time when you did not perform as well as you had wanted. Focusing on an experience like this can result in rewarding reflections about the positive emerging from the negative.
- A Good or Bad Deed – Think about a time when you did or did not stand up for yourself or someone else in the face of adversity or challenge.
- A Change in Your Life – Think about a time when something significant changed in your life. This could be anything from a move across town to a major change in a relationship to the birth or death of a loved one.
- A Realization – Think about a time when you experienced a realization. This could be anything from understanding a complicated math equation to gaining a deeper understanding of a philosophical issue or life situation.
- Step 2: Organize Your Speech
- Organize your speech into an introduction, body, and conclusion. Your outline will have three main parts: the introduction, body, and conclusion.
- The Introduction will begin with an attention getter (a quote, story, personal example, question, statistic, lyrics, etc., NOT “My name is…”) then establish or enhance your credibility, establish rapport, preview your topic/purpose/central idea, and preview your main points.
- The body of the speech will have three main points; therefore, choose a narrative or experience that may be broken down into three parts.
- In the conclusion, signal the end, restate your main points, and conclude with a clincher.