Since the last blog post, I’ve fallen into a regular routine where I practice my speech 3 times a week, twice with my grandmother over FaceTime and once by myself. She gives me tips about my speaking cadence and speed, and how she thinks I could improve. At this point the main goal is just building confidence in my speaking, and getting comfortable with talking in front of people in general. Learning technological speaking etiquette has really been a difficult learning curve, as you don’t just look at the person, you must also look at your camera, whether that be on top of your laptop, or on the front of your phone. Looking at the camera instead of the person’s face is counter intuitive, and so I have a note next to my webcam telling me to look at it as well as the people. You also must remember that even though the person isn’t there, you still have to bring variety into your speaking, possibly even more than usual because people get bored more easily when looking at a screen than looking at a person. Though I haven’t met with my mentor, it’s really just practicing from this point on. 

Originally the plan was to present my speech on the stage in the MPR in front of a bunch of people, which would’ve given me a big confidence boost in terms of my speaking abilities. Instead, I’ll have to record my speech, hopefully with a small audience present to at least give me a bit of practice with real people, and put it up on my blog. Sadly my speech does happen do be longer than 2 minutes, or else I would love to preform it live. I’m also going to put up the script on my blog, so people can look at that too. For my actual presentation, I’m planning on writing up a script of sorts to describe my process of learning, my biggest takeaways, etc. I also want to touch on the mistakes I made throughout the process, and some of the best ways to remedy them.