Chapter 7, Post #1

I felt like I learned quite a bit from the Speech Buddy videos for Chapter 7, especially Erin's video. One piece of useful advice that she gave was to not allow narratives to go on for too long. While a narrative can purvey information and pique the audience's interest, if you allow yourself to go off on too much of a narrative tangent you can lose focus on the main topic of your speech. Another thing that I realized can detract from a speech is the use of definitions. While giving the definition of something may help to stress the point that you are trying to get across, it will not likely change any preconceived connotations of that word or phrase that the audience brought in with them.

Something from the Chapter 8 videos that I learned can encourage audience involvement and participation is to use the Narrative Pattern as the structure for your speech. For our upcoming Demonstration Speech I think this will be a particularly good idea so that the audience feels interested and engaged during the demonstration itself. This is a good time to draw the audience in early on in the speech and hopefully provide momentum to keep them interested throughout the length of the speech. This overall structure combined with the use of a variety of transitions should lead to a successful speech.