RLA: Persuasive Speech Reflection

Finally, after a week of tireless working, I've successfully given my persuasive speech! Watching my video, I was astounded by how I sounded: confident, persuasive, and powerful. It felt amazing to see a different "me" up on stage delivering a powerful message. My favorite part especially was the conclusion. When watching, I felt like the way I gave that last part was really captivating and powerful, almost making me want to join in the procrastination. Overall, I'm really proud of the way I delivered everything in a clear, emphatic manner that was very effective in persuading others.

Then, I evaluated myself against the rubric. The results were pretty good for me, but there is still lots of room for improvement. I think the composition of my speech was great – for that, I gave myself an exemplary. I was very satisfied with the different variety of persuasive tactics used when writing the speech and my original supporting evidence. For the PIPES, I gave myself a mixture of meets and exemplaries. My volume and eye contact and overall stance seemed pretty good. I remember I used to be very stutter-y and could maintain little eye contact, so during this unit, I definitely grew a lot as a speaker. My pace was a tad bit too fast, though. I knew this even when I was up giving the speech, but I was really nervous. When I get nervous, I start talking at a really fast pace. I wish I had more time to fine-tune my delivery. I think that if I'd practiced a couple times more, I would've been a lot less nervous and more confident to talk at a better varied pace and tone.

Looking back, my speech came a long way before getting to the way it is now. I started with a lengthy essay of more than 900 words. One of my biggest challenges was to cut that essay down to an appropriately-lengthed speech. It was very difficult at first, and I could hardly delete anything. Luckily, I was able to learn from my friends who've already given their speeches on other sides and utilize additional advice given to me by my teachers. After deleting some of the less important pieces of information and rephrasing some redundant sentences, my speech was finally around 500 words.

Overall, this speech was very successful. I improved a lot as a persuasive speaker and conquered most of my weaknesses in PIPES.