Public Speeking

                                    Public Speaking

After this week I felt it was kind of necessary to talk about public speaking. We all did it this week and we are all glad to be done with it. As I gave my speech I realized that being a rhetor is not as easy as it looks. It takes a great deal of courage to speak to a crowd and get them to understand your beliefs or at the very least be interested in what you have to say.

When I gave my speech I was beyond nervous and it was hard for the words to come out. This is weird since I am a very outgoing girl who loves talking. On Monday I could barely talk and it felt as though I would faint and I had to stop every so on to breathe. After class people commented me on the fact that I did not use notecards, but that did not make me feel good since my problem was not with the memorization of facts because that is something that I am good at. My problem is being able to stand in front of a crowd and speak without feeling afraid or nervous. I felt as though I will never be a good speaker I would always just be a nervous wreck.

Things got worse for my on Tuesday when I had to give a 30 minute presentation on a short story for my Honors Asian Literature class. The presentation went great I had a lot of information to present and since I was sitting in the front of the class I was not nervous. The problem arose when it seemed like no one was interested in what I had to say. When I looked around the room people were either doing work for some other class or on their phones. This annoyed me because I worked hard to have a good presentation and no one cared.

Public speaking is a very hard thing to do and it is even harder when no one else listens.

Image is everything

                Image is everything

                If I had a nickel for every time someone told me to watch how I represent myself I would be rich by now. It seems like now a day all people care about is your outside appearance. Now that facebook, twitter, and other social media sites are very popular the way you present yourself is very important. Employers look on your facebook to try and gage what type of person you are by the pictures you post and this can have a major impact on your future. I take a lot of pictures that can be viewed as inappropriate because there is a red cup in the background and someone looks slightly intoxicated those pictures stay off the internet. When I entered college I learned the tell-tell signs of partiers and how to present myself so that I to won’t be seen that way.

                When I was a senior in high school I was in a program with the District Atorney’s office and I remember hearing about a case where a guy was found guilty because he posted pictures showing himself with the deceased. That example is extreme. But you never know who is looking at your facebook and how they will view the information seen. Now that I am in a sorority that is really true Panhell the organization which is in charge of all sororities keep an eye out for statuses and pictures that depict Greeks in a negative light so whenever a frat has a party they hid there letters in case someone takes a drunken picture they won’t look bad.

                My facebook as many others is now slightly fake. I hide things about myself due to the image it might present and when we was discussing the fakeness that ethos creates it made me laugh because of this.

Debates and Arguments

“I am the best at arguing.” My best friend from home can constantly be heard saying, which we have all accepted as true. He has a strong invented ethos he has spent the last 5 years of our friendship building a reputation as a great debater and now I would not even bother to argue with him. He would have his points laid out and present them so well and eloquently which is not surprising since he is a communication major. As I go through this class I release more and more the different rhetorical devices he uses. Which contrast the fact that one of the first things I noticed is that he is not a true rhetoric user since he does not allow us to prove him wrong. Even if we have strong arguments he dismiss them as if only his can be right which makes it hard for us to argue with him so I just stopped trying to.

            This is the problem with most debaters you can only have winners or losers so the person who you are arguing with points gets dismissed. The main purpose of rhetoric is to gain the opinions of others and see if their opinions can also be right debate discourages this sense of compromise. That is a problem since debates are the most common form of rhetoric and we end up with problems like people not wanting to argue their opinion the way I am with my friend and this is not good.

            I realized how bad debates are after I had one in my Asian literature class. We were discussing whether or not the dropping of the atomic bomb was right or not. There was mixed opinions and in the end no one’s view changed. My side technically won, but to me it was a lost because people felt the same way after the debate as they did before and a few students asked if the debate can be ended since it was getting heated. Debates are bad rhetoric and discourage compromise and leave us all as losers.

Martin Luther king

                In celebration of African American history month I thought I should talk about Martin Luther King Jr. “I have a Dream” speech. Which as we all know is one of the best pieces of rhetoric of the modern day. What I realized is that I never actually read or heard it only heard about or seen brief excerpts. It is crazy that one of the most famous speeches of all time is rarely read or analyzed. It can be used as a great teaching device for classes in history, law, politics, English, and obviously rhetoric. The speech is not only useful for academic purposes, but it is moving and encouraging.

            I am not going to sit here and talk of the rhetoric devices used anybody can look and see the pathos, logos, and others. I am going to discuss what the speech went to me. When I read this speech 48 years after it was recited I realized that his dram has only been partially realized. I felt the urge to go out and be kind to all my fellow men and do everything to make the America he dreamed of. Most importantly I wanted to teach this speech to the other children who do not yet know of it. Just like his speech encouraged me to jump to action it inspired a generation to march and protest peacefully in southern states all across the country.

            It also encouraged peace which is the main reason why I feel as though we are not living his dream. He wanted people to treat each other as brothers without violence or hatred. The amount of violence not in generally, but in the African American community which is something that it’s sad to see. It has been 48 years and the community at first moved to fulfilling his dream. But recently taken a step back and after reading this speech it truly saddened me.