As I reflect on my overall speech performance, I find that there are many personal improvements that can be made for the future. While I will admit that the written aspect of my speech itself is something I am very proud of, as not only did I take a lot of time to write and edit it, but it is something that reflects my genuine passion regarding the subject, I do feel that my performance of the speech is something with much to be improved upon.

I feel that my biggest weakness in my speech recording is my overall “stage presence” and lack of maintained eye contact with the ‘”audience”.  A factor that I likely contributed to my lack of these things was my overall memorization of my speech. I do not think that I prepared myself quite enough in regards to having it decently memorized to avoid needing to read a script. While I tried my best to alternate between my script and the audience, I did find while rewatching my recording that I struggled to keep my eyes completely off of the script at many points during my speech.

However, while I have highlighted the many weaknesses I find within my speech performance, I have also found many strengths. As mentioned before, the topic of my speech is one that I posses great passion towards, and therefore I was able to easily use vocal tone shifts to portray the emotion I wanted to be relayed to the audience. Piggybacking off of this, I feel that being able to relay messages and feelings while maintaining audience interest is something I accomplished, as I used a strong hook and kept my speech fairly concise and straight forward with the information I wanted to share and message I was aiming to spread.

Overall, while I am still very proud of my work and feel that I have written a speech that both informs and reflects my passion, I still have work to do when it comes to the overall speech performance aspect, and will be sure to improve upon it for the next time.