Sticky Idea

I stated in the previous entry about how much shorter the actual speech seems when performing it live than during practice.  Again I should reiterate that and state that when I practiced, the speech was at least 7 minutes.  I had to actually take out one slide and lots of the key points.  In reality, this presentation was only around 5 minutes.  So from these two past presentations, I've come to the conclusion that when I'm actually up presenting, I tend to speak a bit faster than I normally would.

I thought the content of the presentation was rich and the takeaway message was something easily applicable in today's society.  The slides were simple and I personally thought the best part about them was using the red text when talking about the transcript of Malcolm X's speech.  Some found it to be distracting, but I thought I didn't linger on too much on one particular set of highlighted words.

Some improvements I've recognized was the reduced, sudden movements of my arm after using the clicker.  On a related note, the clicker did not bother me at all during this presentation.  I also realized that I did not say "pretty much" once during my presentation!  However, there were many "uhh"s, "umm"s, and unnecessary "but"s here and there.  The "umm"s especially stood out in this speech.

In this presentation, I decided to use notecards with pictures of the slides on them.  I thought it helped me out more, but as people stated, I did get a little too dependent on them.  Mark and Julie both stated that I should prepare more and not let the notecards take control of my presentation.  For future presentations, I should use the notecards with only pictures of the slides because for this speech, I had lots of text on the back each notecard, which made it look I was depending on it more.

One other thought to mention was that my biography/background info on Malcolm X was quite lengthy.  I probably should have cut out a few facts, but I didn't think it took away from the presentation that much.

On a side note, I got a good laugh when Lauren and Haris said I was "mocking" his speech.  I never meant to show that I was "mocking" his speech; it was more on the grounds of using his structure to deliver my message.