I am writing a post about persuasive speeches and I will post it soon, but I want everyone to click on the assignment tab and submit a topic and/or an outline if you have either. 
 
On Saturday most of you, 18 of 25, gave informative speeches. You did rather well. You learned as much from listening to speeches as you did from giving them. 

Let's consider the fact that our semester is ending rather soon, and we only have 4 more class meetings left over the next 5 weeks (no class Thanksgiving week).

Over these next 5 weeks you have two major goals: (1) a persuasive speech and (2) a final. Your final, which I have yet to talk about, will be an in class intramural on the day of the final. An intramural is a friendly competiton. You will give your persuasive speech twice and if you make it to the third and final round, you will give it a third time. Everyone will watch the final and I will give out 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place position. You can use your informative for the final, but you need to increase the time and you should know that persuasive speeches are natural more competitive speeches. I will talk a lot more about this later, but you should know about this now to motivate you to get your speech done now!

Your persuasive speech is going to be exciting and this is where everything we have learned will come together. I am excited to teach you more about persuasive speaking, I say more because I have have been teaching you about persuasive speaking whether you are aware of it or not. Persuasive speaking is an art and a science. In the next post I will outline the requirements for your persuasive speech, we will review some things we have learned about persuasive speaking, and finally we will discuss what you need to do to have a speech that you will be proud of on speech day.


 
I just want to put this out there as reminder. I don't want to make you nervous or anything, but you really need to make sure you come and give your speech this morning. If you do not present this weeek then you unfairly get another week of prepreation and I will grade you harder, and that is only IF we have the time to let you give your speech next because the chances are that we wont. Get to class today no matter how unprepared you think you are; here is what the syllabus says about missed speeches:

Late Assignments: Assignments are due at the beginning of the class period and will not be 
accepted thereafter.  If you are scheduled to give a speech on a given class day and you miss
it, YOU MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO MAKE IT UP. You may make-up only ONE speech. 
You may make up that speech during the following week in front of the class. If you do not 
make up your speech the following week, I offer only one class hour at the end of the 
semester for make-up speeches. I will only be able to accommodate a maximum of ten total 
make-up speeches on make up day, so plan carefully. Speeches presented on make up day 
are penalized 30%.
 
Do you have any last minute questions?  Do you need some help? You can comment here or email me as usual. 
 
Remember this IS an important part of your speech. It is worth 5% of your grade, but this is not suppose to take up a lot of time or take that much effort. The outline should not take that much time because you should already have your resources. Your outline should take less than 45 minutes. An outline is a skeleton of a speech. There should NOT be paragraphs, it should be a mere handful of sentences.

Remember what it is that I am grading you on, I am not grading your typing and formatting abilities. I am not really grading your ability to even form grammatically correct sentences. What I am grading you on is your ability to:

1. organize your information
2. adhere to the structure, 
3. include reliable sources, 
4. form a thesis statement
5. Being concise 


Reference sections
I am looking for at least 3 key pieces of information in your reference sections in your outline and at least 2 in your speeches:

In outline
1. Author Name
2. Year of publication
3. Title 

For example: 
Smith, J. (2012). The life of Jane Smith.

In speeches:

1. Author name
2. Year of publication

For example:
According to Smith 2012...


outlineguideline.docx
File Size: 63 kb
File Type: docx
Download File

 
Picture
If you are watching the speeches for credit, make sure to take notes. 

 
Here are the forms we looked at in class. The speech evaluation form is rather common way to view speech
criteria_for_evaluating_speeches_1.doc
File Size: 26 kb
File Type: doc
Download File

speech_evaluation_form.doc
File Size: 37 kb
File Type: doc
Download File

 
Here are some sample speeches. These are various types of speeches, but you should keep in mind that your most pressing goal is to create an informative speech by November 10th. 
This "after dinner speech" or "speech to entertain" we watched in class. There are some important lessons we learned from this video about how to give a speech, structure and what is and what is not an informative speech.
Tell me what is good and bad about this "Wedding Crashing" speech. What are his references? 


Try not to tear up!
This comment from youtube makes a good point and gives context:
It seems that many people seem to have the wrong idea of this video, so before you comment, please understand: This is not Hitler. This is Charlie Chaplin. The clips of the video above that show a man who resembles Hitler are from a film called The Great Dictator, in which Chaplin plays a character who, through a series of circumstances, was mistaken for a dictator based on Hitler. When asked to give a speech as the new ruler, being a good man, he instead gave the speech you are hearing now.
-MasterAndreRaven 

 
"What is real?" "is there really such thing as a mountain?"

These are a couple of the questions we pondered in class as we considered how to inform someone about something. There are philosophical problems about reality and knowledge that people have been trying to answer for thousands of years. Presenting credible, reliable, dependable and reliable information can be a formatiable task. Some evidence is simply better than other evidence. Likewise, some sources are better than others. Primary data and primary sources are the "best" sources to have but in this class and as an undergraduate (generally) secondary sources are not only acceptable but often preferable.


Examples of good sources of evidence for your informative speeches:
Newspapers
Books
Textbooks
CQ researcher
Interviews
Speeches


It behooves you to have a topic and at least a rough outline of a speech for Saturday's class. If you have an outline and a good portion of your speech, then we will be able to work on the issues YOU have IN CLASS. If you do not have an outline or a topic, then you will have to workout all of those issues by yourself the week leading up to speech day.

In our last class we discussed a lot of important issues. A lot. We had a topic generating activity were we stressed the significance of a topic. Choosing a challenging topic is an essential element of creating an "A" level informative or persuasive speech. I demonstrated how to take a seemingly shallow topic and use questions about interconnectedness and interdependence to supply depth to your discussion. In other words, to find the significance of a topic you need to explore relationships and issues of dependence (you should ask me more questions about this).

Another key issue we discussed is organization. We have been talking about organization over and over again because it is the key to a good speech. How one organizes main points adds to the effectiveness, clarity and creativity of a speech. You have many options for organizing your information, chronologically, by cause and effect, effect and cause, by differences, by simularites. There are many, many ways to organize a speech. 

Stay tuned for more...