Self-Evaluation

It is important to self-evaluate yourself after doing a speech because you can think about how you did critically and decide what you did wrong, what you could improve on, and what your strengths were. I think that I was successful in achieving the purpose of my speech. I had sufficient background information on my topic and was able to demonstrate my topic clearly. I was fairly confident during my speech. I did stutter once or twice when trying to get out a long sentence, though. In my next speech, I will improve by remembering not to use fillers. In my last two speeches, I used a few umm’s and uh’s between sentences and when I lost my train of thought. If I were to do the whole speech over again, I would have practiced my conclusion more. At the end I was not as confident because I had focused a lot more on the beginning and middle of my speech. In delivery, I would improve a little by slowing down a bit. I thought that my organization worked just fine though because it felt like each point followed the last logically and flowed into one another. My one goal for improving the content of my speech would be to choose a topic that was of more interest to me. I found it hard to say anything interesting about the subject when I did not find it interesting or entertaining at all. As I said before I could improve my delivery by slowing down, but I could also make sure that I remember to speak clearly. When I first thought back on my video, the first thing that I thought about was that my delivery was not bad, but that it could have been more conversational. The most distracting thing that I did during my speech was to touch my hair quite a few times. I will definitely remember to pull my hair back next time because it kept falling in my face, so I would move it away out of habit, without even noticing. I would rate my eye contact as an 8.5/10. I thought that through the beginning and middle I had good eye contact, but I remember that towards the end, where I did not know my speech as well, I was forced to look down to check my note cards. I only cited my sources twice, which was obviously not enough. I think it was because I would remember the statement that I was trying to make, but I would have trouble remembering which citation went with which one, so I did not say them aloud. The other reason was that it felt a little strange saying your citation aloud, so I kind of just passed over them. Based on my memory of how I did, I would give myself an A because I think that I was able to meet each of the requirements well. I did not miss any of the points that we were supposed to make and was able to go above and beyond on some of them. Specifically, I followed the outline well, which made my speech flow well from intro to each main point and then concluded in a logical manner. I also think that I had practiced adequately for my speech and was able to deliver it without reading directly from my  note cards, and I did manage to make it sound fairly conversational.