FSW Best Practices and Effective Speech Essay

During this course, you have learned about best practices when it comes to presenting a speech. Before your larger speech, you will conduct an out of class speech observation.  Instead of physically attending a speaking event, you are going to critique and evaluate a TED Talk speaker of your choosing. TED Talk topics cover a range of interests and you are sure to find one you connect with; however, the video must be at least 12 minutes long (ideally about 20 minutes). You can search for videos here: Ted Talks (Links to an external site.)

Written Assignment Criteria

In this essay you have three objectives:

1. Introduce the essay in a creative way while previewing your upcoming points of critique.
2. Select at least three aspects of the speaking event that you found most meaningful and strongly connected to our course content.
   • Below is a list, although not comprehensive, that you may use to guide your critique:
     • Define, justify, and critique each of the three aspects you selected using evidence from our course text.
     • At a minimum, you need to cite the course textbook as your form of evidence. 
3. Describe the meaningfulness of this experience as it relates to your own public speaking knowledge and skill development. In other words, what will you do similarly and/or differently in your future presentations based on this experience?

Guiding Questions/Ideas

• How did the speaker gain audience attention? Was it effective?
• How did the speaker make his or her topic relevant to the audience?
• How did the speaker establish his or her credibility?
• Describe and analyze the purpose of the speech.
• Examine the type of visual aid that was used. 
• Describe the types of support used by the speaker. How, if at all, were they effective?
• Analyze the speaker’s verbal and nonverbal delivery.
• Describe the speaker’s use of language. Include such details as word choice, articulation, etc.
• What was your overall reaction to the speech?
• What was the audience’s reaction?
• How, if at all, did this experience improve your personal presentational speaking skills?