Lights, Camera, Let's Talk

I hit the button, and it all begins. The lights shining down, the camera recording, and everyone's eyes on me. That's not nerve racking at all right? No, it's completely nerve racking and something I put a lot of preparation into ahead of time in order to ensure my talk went well.

I started preparing days in advance, narrowing my topic focus further from my essay to ensure I could hold my audience's attention. I pulled most of my information from my essay, and even did some additional research specifically for the talk. I decided to focus my talk more on the significance and impact that GMO's have had on people's lives, rather than the history and the shift itself. 

As soon as I had what I wanted to say and had written it out, I began to think, what was a creative way in which I could grasp the audience's attention at the very beginning and hold it until the end. After thinking about it for what felt like an eternity, it hit me, everyone loves food and my talk discusses food. I then decided that because class is at 9 o'clock granola bars would help make the perfect example. I quickly worked this audience interaction into my talk, excited about this idea. 

Once everything was written and planned out, I finally began practicing giving my talk. I began giving it to myself in the mirror, followed by walking around my room giving it, practicing with my roommate and my friends. Finally when I had the talk down, I practiced clicking through my visual at specific points of my presentation because I knew I didn't want to look back at the screen while talking, but wanted to make sure my visual lined up with what I was saying.

After finally giving my talk for the class, I went back to my room to watch my performance. It was almost hard to to plug in the flash drive and watch myself talk, it's just a strange feeling to watch yourself give presentations like that. When I finally put in the flash drive and began to watch it, I was pretty pleased with myself. I felt like the talk overall went well, but could have been improved some.

I felt that the talk itself was coherent and flowed nicely, starting with a story moving into examples and history and then wrapping up with a connection to the beginning. I also felt that my visual aid was relatively effective. If I was to do this again though, I would make my visual sides black instead of white because I felt that the white was almost distracting from the talk, whereas black slides would shift the audience's focus from the screen to my talk.

As far as delivery goes, I felt it went relatively well. I made sure to make eye contact with everyone in the room, and had the entire talk memorized, so that I would not have to rely on notes while speaking. I also felt that my tone and inflection were much better than during my Civic Artifact Speech, with more emphasis on certain points of the talk and making sure my voice did not fall into a rhythmic pattern of inflection throughout the performance. However, there was one area of my talk in which I stumbled a bit, tripped up on my words. I then proceeded to touch my hair, a tell tale sign of nervousness. I think there were added nerves and stress knowing that the talk was being recorded, but I would fix this by simply practicing more and just remembering that the talk does not need to be verbatim the same each time I give it.

Overall, I felt that the Ted Talk went relatively well. There are things that I felt I did really well and other things that I wish I had done a little differently. It definitely helps to watch yourself speak, to identify things that need improvement and to see what you excel at.