Public Speaking Mid Term

Chapter 2.2 Key Takeaways

All eight of the principles espoused in the NCA Credo for Ethical Communication can be applied to public speaking. Some of the principles relate more to the speaker's role in communication, while others relate to both the speaker's and the audience's role in public speech. When preparing a speech, it is important to think about the ethics of public speaking from the beginning. When a speaker sets out to be ethical in his or her speech from the beginning, arriving at ethical speech is much easier.

Chapter 3.1 Key Takeaways

Communication apprehension refers to the fear or anxiety people experience at the thought of being evaluated by others. Some anxiety is a normal part of the communication process. The psychological threat individuals perceive in the communication situation prompts physiological changes designed to help the body respond. These physical reactions to stress create the uncomfortable feelings of unease called speech anxiety and may include sweaty palms, shaking, butterflies in the stomach, and dry mouth. A great deal of conventional advice for managing stage fright is misleading, including suggestions that speech anxiety is neurotic, that telling a joke is a good opening, that imagining the audience naked is helpful, that any mistake is fatal to an effective speech, that memorizing a script is useful, that audiences are out to get you, and that your audience sees how nervous you really are.

Chapter 3.2 Key Takeaways

Communication apprehension stems from many sources, including the speaker's personality characteristics, communication context, nature of the audience, or situation. Many factors exaggerate communication apprehension. Formality, familiarity, novelty, perceived similarity, and subordinate status are a few of the factors that influence our tendency to feel anxious while speaking.

Chapter 6.3 Key Takeaways

Conducting a personal inventory is a good way to start the topic selection process. When we analyze our own experiences, interests, knowledge, and passions, we often find topics that others will also find interesting and useful. A speaker can investigate finding aids when searching for a good topic. Various finding aids have their positives and negatives, so we recommend investigating several different finding aids to see what topic ideas inspire you. One way to ensure a successful speech is to identify your audience's interests or needs. When the speaker's topic is immediately useful for the audience, the audience will listen to the speech and appreciate it.

Chapter 2.3 Key Takeaways

Freedom of speech is the right to express information, ideas, and opinions free of government restrictions based on content and subject only to reasonable limitations. Free speech helps us to enact other freedoms protected by the First Amendment, including freedom of assembly and freedom of religion. Without free speech, we would not be able to assemble in groups to publically debate and challenge government policies or laws. Without free speech, we would not be able to exercise our rights to express our religious views even when they are at odds with popular opinion.

Chapter 1.2 Key Takeaways

Getting your message across to others effectively requires attention to message content, skill in communicating content, and your passion for the information presented. The interactional models of communication provide a useful foundation for understanding communication and outline basic concepts such as sender, receiver, noise, message, channel, encoding, decoding, and feedback. The transactional model builds on the interactional models by recognizing that people can enact the roles of sender and receiver simultaneously and that interactants cocreate meaning through shared fields of experience. The dialogic theory of public speaking understands public speaking as a dialogue between speaker and audience. This dialogue requires the speaker to understand that meaning depends on the speaker's and hearer's vantage points and that context affects how we must design and deliver our messages.

Chapter 7.2 Key Takeaways

In conducting research for a speech, commit adequate time and plan your schedule. Consider both the research time, or time spent gathering information, and the preparation time needed to organize and practice your speech. Get a general idea of your research needs even before going to the library so that you can take the most advantage of the library's resources and librarians' help. We live in a world dominated by information, but some information is filtered and some is not. It's important to know the difference between academic and nonacademic sources. Nonacademic sources are a good place to gain general knowledge of a topic; these include books, general or special-interest periodicals, newspapers and blogs, and websites. Academic sources offer more specialized, higher-level information; they include books, articles, computer databases, and web resources. A fundamental responsibility is to evaluate the sources you choose to use in order to ensure that you are presenting accurate and up-to-date information in your speech.

verbal and nonverbal communication

Language is our principal means of communicating; verbal-information transmitted through words; nonverbal-our expressions, stances, gestures, and movements, even if unconscious, that convey information.

Chapter 6.4 Key Takeaways

Moving from a general to specific purpose requires you to identify the who, what, when, where, and why of your speech. State your specific purpose in a sentence that includes the general purpose, a description of the intended audience, and a prepositional phrase summarizing the topic. When creating a specific purpose for your speech, first, consider your audience. Second, consider the rhetorical situation. Make sure your specific purpose statement uses clear language, and that it does not try to cover more than one topic. Make sure you can realistically accomplish your specific purpose within the allotted time.

Chapter 1.1 Key Takeaways

People have many reasons for engaging in public speaking, but the skills necessary for public speaking are applicable whether someone is speaking for informative, persuasive, or entertainment reasons. Taking a public speaking class will improve your speaking skills, help you be a more critical thinker, fine-tune your verbal and nonverbal communication skills, and help you overcome public speaking anxiety. Effective public speaking skills have many direct benefits for the individual speaker, including influencing the world around you, developing leadership skills, and becoming a go-to person for ideas and solutions.

Chapter 3.4 Key Takeaways

Plan ahead for how to cope with unexpected difficulties such as forgetting part of your speech content, having technical trouble with visual aids, or being interrupted by external distractions.

Chapter 7.1 Key Takeaways

Research is a fascinating and fun process because it allows us to find answers to questions, it exposes us to new ideas, and it can lead us to pursue new activities. Primary and secondary sources are quite common in research literature. Primary research is where the author has conducted the research him or herself and secondary research is when an author reports on research conducted by others.

Chapter 6.2 Key Takeaways

Selecting a topic is a process. We often start by selecting a broad area of knowledge and then narrowing the topic to one that is manageable for a given rhetorical situation. When finalizing a specific purpose for your speech, always ask yourself four basic questions: (1) Does the topic match my intended general purpose?; (2) Is the topic appropriate for my audience?; (3) Is the topic appropriate for the given speaking context?; and (4) Can I reasonably hope to inform or persuade my audience in the time frame I have for the speech?

Chapter 7.3 Key Takeaways

Style focuses on the components of your speech that make up the form of your expression rather than your content. Social science disciplines, such as psychology, human communication, and business, typically use APA style, while humanities disciplines, such as English, philosophy, and rhetoric, typically use MLA style. The APA sixth edition and the MLA seventh edition are the most current style guides and the tables presented in this chapter provide specific examples of common citations for each of these styles. Citing sources within your speech is a three-step process: set up the citation, provide the cited information, and interpret the information within the context of your speech. A direct quotation is any time you utilize another individual's words in a format that resembles the way they were originally said or written. On the other hand, a paraphrase is when you take someone's ideas and restate them using your own words to convey the intended meaning. Ethically using sources means avoiding plagiarism, not engaging in academic fraud, making sure not to mislead your audience, providing credentials for your sources so the audience can make judgments about the material, and using primary research in ways that protect the identity of participants. Plagiarism is a huge problem and creeps its way into student writing and oral presentations. As ethical communicators, we must always give credit for the information we convey in our writing and our speeches.

Chapter 2.1 Key Takeaways

The ethics pyramid is a pictorial way of understanding the three fundamental parts of ethics: intent, means, and ends. Intent exists at the base of the ethical pyramid and serves as a foundation for determining the ethics of specific behavior. Means are the tools one uses to accomplish a goal and constitute the second layer of the ethical pyramid. Finally, ends are the results that occur after a specific behavior has occurred and exist at the top of the pyramid.

Chapter 8.1 Key Takeaways

The strategies a public speaker can use to provide corroborating evidence for the speech's central idea and specific purpose are called support. There are three primary reasons to use support: to clarify content, to increase speaker credibility, and to make the speech more vivid. A good piece of support should be accurate, authoritative, current, and unbiased.

Chapter 3.3 Key Takeaways

There are many steps you can take during the speech preparation process to manage your communication apprehension, including thinking positively, analyzing your audience, clearly organizing your ideas, adapting your language to the oral mode, and practicing. You can employ a variety of techniques while you are speaking to reduce your apprehension, such as anticipating your body's reactions, focusing on the audience, and maintaining your sense of humor. Stress management techniques, including cognitive restructuring and systematic desensitization, can also be helpful.

Chapter 6.1 Key Takeaways

There are three general purposes that all speeches fall into: to inform, to persuade, and to entertain. Depending on what your ultimate goal is, you will start by picking one of these general purposes and then selecting an appropriate speech pattern that goes along with that general purpose. Informative speeches can focus on objects, people, events, concepts, processes, or issues. It is important to remember that your purpose in an informative speech is to share information with an audience, not to persuade them to do or believe something. There are two basic types of persuasion: pure and manipulative. Speakers who attempt to persuade others for pure reasons do so because they actually believe in what they are persuading an audience to do or think. Speakers who persuade others for manipulative reasons do so often by distorting the support for their arguments because they have an ulterior motive in persuading an audience to do or think something. If an audience finds out that you've been attempting to manipulate them, they will lose trust in you. Entertainment speeches can be after-dinner, ceremonial, or inspirational. Although there may be informative or persuasive elements to your speech, your primary reason for giving the speech is to entertain the audience.

Expressions of intolerance and hatred that are to be avoided include using

ageist, heterosexist, racist, sexist, and any other form of speech that demeans or belittles a group of people.

"thought leader"

an individual who contributes new ideas that help various aspects of society

informative speaking

publicly addressing others to increase their knowledge, understanding, or skills

Persuasive Speaking

speaking that influences others to believe or think something, or to take action

Entertaining speaking

speech designed to captivate an audience's attention and regale or amuse them while delivering a clear message

Public speaking is

the process of designing and delivering a message to an audience

Effective public speaking involves ...

understanding your audience and speaking goals, choosing elements for the speech that will engage your audience with your topic, and delivering your message skillfully