Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Strengths and Weaknesses of My Public Speaking

I am now taking a January term course called, "The Arts of Communications". This course is intended to teach how to communicate effectively for students who want to be leaders in politics or the public policy area. During this two-week course, each student will do 4 speeches, and the teacher and students will give feedback on those speeches.

I have already made 3 speeches in class. I have learned that the most important principle of effective communication is to be "listener-focused". You can achieve this by three of the most powerful tools to persuade the audience are logos (argument by logic), pathos (argument by emotion), and ethos (argument by character). Reflecting on my own experience, I feel that persuading people only by logic is difficult. For example, when I decided to work at my current organization, not only the logic, but also the passion of the recruiter in his job and his reliable, charismatic character convinced me. In my life, I have mainly trained my logos skills because I majored in engineering as an undergraduate and graduate student. But I have not trained much about how to appeal to the audience's emotions by making use of story and how to influence the audience by my own character. Through this eye-opening course, I am learning how to persuade people by expanding my use of pathos and ethos in addition to logos.

I have received a lot of feedback which overrides what I thought was good style. For example, I was told the following: your first draft should be your voice since writing language and speaking language are totally different things. You don't have to show the structure of the speech, such as "there are three reasons for this", since those phrases are boring for listeners. Also, you don't have to say the general introduction, such as "hello, my name is so and so and today I will talk about such and such." This feedback has made me realize that there is no clear-cut answer to what makes a great speech.

In speech sessions, students are divided into small groups of 4-5. Each student gives a 4-minute presentation, followed by Q&A session. After that, the audience gives detailed feedback on the speaker's voice, body language, eye-contact, introduction, body, conclusion, story, and persuasiveness. To my surprise, I was highly rated for my delivery of speech, including voice, body language, eye-contact, pace of the speech, and utilization of silence. On the other hand, my persuasiveness was not so highly rated. This was a new finding for me because it was the opposite result from what I recognized as my strengths and weaknesses. Whenever I speak, I make sure to project my voice and speak slowly and clearly because I can't speak fluently like native English speakers. I think this effort makes my presentation easy to listen to, and gives a good impression to the audience. Until I took this class, I thought that the fact I could not speak fluently would be my weakness, but now I think I can convert this weakness to a strength in my speeches. 

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