Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Speeches Oct 14

Today, I was most impressed by the speech on the Julian Center. She did a great job at delivering the speech, and had a nice balance between the appeals to pathos and ethos.

The speech on Big Brothers Big Sisters also made me want to learn more about the organization. Connecting the speech to someone we know made it very strong.

One thing that I have noticed about "successful" speeches are that they have some things in common. The ones that I remember most clearly are those that connected their organization to something that relates to their audience. Things like personal stories or tales of people our age and younger seem to have had the most impact.

I also best remember speeches presented by fairly dynamic speakers. This is probably why the Julian Center speech caught my attention: the speaker used vocal inflections and even body movements to help her make her point. Part of this may have been that I had trouble paying attention to the people who kept their eyes strictly to the paper. Even though I knew that their words may have been eloquent, the presentation of the content was half of the persuasive argument.

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