Speech Reflection

Overall, I would say that my presentation went well, and I am very happy with the content I presented. It really helped that I was genuinely interested in my topic, which made reciting the information a lot more natural because it was something I knew a lot about as opposed to just having memorized.

My groupmates mentioned that they appreciated the format of my slides, especially when I gave direct quotes from FDR’s speech. I feel like that was a good way to present the information without it seeming too wordy. They also mentioned that standing up during my presentation made me seem more engaged in the material.

My other groupmates had such great speeches and I was really impressed with both the information they presented and how they presented it. They were all so confident in the information they were presenting which showed very clearly in terms of their posture, hand gestures, and tone. This confidence is definitely something I hope to learn from my groupmates because it is definitely something I need to improve upon.

I was pretty nervous about having my peers watch my speech, as I’m sure most people can relate to. There’s really nothing I hate more than speaking in front of people, but my group was super supportive which was a huge relief. I expected pre-recording the speech to be a lot easier than presenting to a live audience, and for the most part, it was. The only problem was that I became I lot more aware of how many mistakes or filler words I used during my speech than I normally would have. Every time I felt like I took too long of a pause, or something like that, then I would rerecord. I thought it would be a lot harder to memorize parts of my speech, but after a lot of takes, it actually came pretty naturally.

After this project, I think I definitely know my strengths as well as how to capitalize on them and also things I can improve upon for our next project.