TED Talk Evaluation

Link to my TED Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0rwKWJZOd8

Writing and performing a TED Talk was a challenge to say the least. I’ve always felt confident about public speaking, as I’m a very outgoing person in general, but knowing that I would not only have to stand up in front of a crowd without notes, I wasn’t really allowed to look at my powerpoint either. Long story short, it was a measure of how well you knew your material, and more importantly, how passionate you were about the topic you had chosen.

Practicing it the night before, I was getting nervous. I was trying to memorize unnecessary lines and fluff up my transitions, with little regard to the actual content of the slides, and a stronger emphasis on the memorization of the material. As I struggled to practice in front of my friends, they took my notes away from me. They would not let me look at them at all. They told me that I knew the material, I had written it down and spent time researching it. So, instead of reading off my notes, I went from memory. I remembered the pictures on each slide, and how it fit into the story I was trying to tell, and why I chose to put one slide after another and so forth, until eventually, my slides and transitions were flowing much better than they ever had before.

Going up to present to the class the day of the TED talk, I was still not very confident. I knew the material, but practicing the past couple of days, my talk had gone way over 5 minutes. The key thing I think I struggled with, therefore, was narrowing down the amount of information in my talk. I really wanted to talk about all the different aspects and causes of obesity, as that was my topic, but there were so many that I found myself rushing through each one. Instead of going into detail about one or two of the general ideas, I was more providing a general overview of multiple topics, that made the presentation seemingly incoherent. So, instead, I adjusted my presentation, and focused on two major areas rather than several smaller ones. The areas I decided to focus on were  food accessibility and cultural ideologies associated with obesity and class status. While broad, these two topics were enough to cover the necessary information that I wanted to talk about in my TED talk.

A key strategy I used was memorizing the first line of my talk. This worked to my advantage because once I had the first topic sentence out, the rest of my presentation flowed smoothly after it even though I did not attempt to memorize it. Rather, I remembered what I put on each slide, and went from one to the other with smooth transitions.

One of my biggest faults was getting nervous and talking to fast, or repeating myself. Once I began to psych myself out, I would begin to stutter and loose my place or train of thought. I also felt time crunched, as even though I had cut things out of the slides, there was still so much I wanted to talk about. That being said, I got nervous that I was rambling on too much, and as a result began to ramble more, or worse fidget with my hair or rock back and forth in order to calm myself down. Not only was this probably distracting for the viewer, it was distracting for me as the presenter because I could feel myself getting nervous and beginning to say things unrelated to my topic.

However, one of the things I did to fix this problem was simply to remind myself I knew the material. I had learned it, and I had researched it, and this was my time to shine and show my class that I knew what I was talking about. As a result, I found myself calming down, and most importantly, being able to focus on what I was saying at that point in time, and not necessarily worrying about what I was going to say next.