Diego Zayas - Reflection 1

 My first time dealing with the college public speaking course was with a lot of worry. The idea of giving a speech to a room of my classmates and a professor, while trying to stay calm, felt scary. The class textbook, "Public Speaking: The Evolving Art" by Stephanie Coopman, gave me the basic ideas for the class, but it was the first series of four group presentations that truly turned these ideas into real, useful lessons. These projects were a key link between what I read and what I had to do in real life, and they have greatly changed how I think about good public speaking.

The first presentation focused on the first few chapters of the book, covering things like audience analysis, picking a topic, and the first steps of writing a speech. Before this project, I saw these things as just items on a list. However, the presentation showed clearly how a speaker's success depends on a deep and caring understanding of their audience. The group's examples showed that a speech on a hard topic like financial technology, even if it has the same information, needs a completely different style for a normal audience versus a group of business experts. The way you choose words, examples, and your tone must be carefully picked for the person listening. This lesson was a big change in how I saw things, changing public speaking from a show to a real back-and-forth. It showed me that the true skill is not in what the speaker says, but in how the audience takes it in.

The second presentation was all about delivery, a part of public speaking that I had not paid enough attention to. Through a number of shows, my peers made it clear how big of an effect both speaking and not speaking can have. We saw the clear difference between a speaker reading from a paper, with stiff body language and no eye contact, and a speaker giving an unprepared talk with real feeling. The first person, while maybe having perfect words, made a wall between them and the audience, while the second person, even with small mistakes, made a real and strong connection. This project made a key point from the book stand out: things like how you talk, your body, and your face are not just extra things, but are a main part of the message. It taught me that being real and having passion can often be more convincing than a perfect, memorized talk, and that the goal is to talk like a real person, not to act like a perfect robot.

The third group , the one that I was a part of, project looked into the rules of structure and persuasion, getting into the smart way of organizing speeches and using emotional and logical appeals—logos, pathos, and ethos. The presentation carefully broke down a made-up persuasive speech, showing how each part has its own job. An emotional story at the beginning creates pathos, while a well-cited fact in the middle builds logos. The ending, with a strong, forward-looking statement, makes the speaker's ethos stronger. This project was very helpful in making the art of convincing others easier to understand. It showed me that a good argument is a skill, built on a step-by-step and planned flow of ideas. I realized that even a simple topic can be made strong and easy to remember with a clear plan, and this thought gave me a new sense of confidence in my ability to build a sound and convincing argument.

The final presentation of this series dealt with using visual aids and, most importantly, dealing with public speaking nervousness. The group gave useful, proven advice that was more than just the book's ideas. They gave clear guides for making strong, clean slides and shared useful methods for reducing before-speech jitters. This included simple but good techniques like breathing exercises and having a backup plan if your technology fails. Most importantly, the talk made the feeling of fear seem normal, changing it from a bad weakness to a natural body reaction that can be used for good. This was a very helpful lesson for me, as I had always seen my nervousness as a big problem. The project helped me see that the goal is not to get rid of anxiety completely, but to get the mental and physical tools to handle it and use it well.

Finishing these first four projects has changed my first nervousness into a feeling of purpose and clear direction. The presentations were not just school tasks; they were a group effort to show the real, live uses of the ideas in "The Evolving Art." They have given me a useful set of tools for my next assignments and, more importantly, have given me a new way to see how to talk to people. I now approach public speaking knowing that it is a skill based on thought, being able to change, and being real. I am sure that the lessons I got from these first projects will be a strong base for the rest of the class and for the future. The skill of public speaking, as the book's title says, is a changing one, and I feel that my own journey of change has only just started.