One Final Thought

I really enjoyed reading Chapter 10 on preparing and presenting public speeches.  I have been dreading taking speech class my entire college career based on the fact that I don’t want to get up in front of a bunch of strangers and be the center of attention.  The chapter had a lot of great useful information such as how the introduction of your speech should grab the audience’s attention and how the conclusion should summarize what you have talked about and leave the audience with a feeling of closure.  I think I could have benefited more with how to deal with the anxiety during your speech, ways to help if your mind goes blank, perhaps what you should focus your eye contact on during the speech, how to prepare for questions at the end, etc.  Or perhaps how to take a speech from being a memorized, rehearsed speech to making it more personal so it’s like you are telling a story instead of reading it from note cards.

The Concept I Found Most Interesting....

I felt the most interesting concept I learned this semester was about organization communication.  I learned a lot about communication in the workplace and I constantly feel I learn something new every day at my current job.  I work in a multi-cultural office so learning to communicate with a different culture was a struggle for me at first.  I had a hard time understanding accents, gestures and dialects.  It has been a wonderful learning experience.  I also really learned about typical interviewing questions because for the first time in my career I have started interviewing people instead of being the one who is being interviewed.  It is very empowering and I learned a lot of new questions to ask.  I also liked the questions the interviewee should bring up, as well as interviewee questions that should not be brought up such as salary expectations, etc.  The chapter was very applicable to my everyday life at my job.

Experimental Research

During the Presidential election, I often saw heated posts and comments on Facebook regarding that person’s political stance.  At times it got annoying and caused me to ponder “unfriending” these people or blocking their posts from my news feed.    Which in turn caused me to wonder…..are people more likely to unfriend or block posts from people who annoy them versus confronting that person and telling them how they feel?  If I were to conduct research I would most likely use the experimental research method.  I would rather manipulate the question so I can provide them with choice A or choice B to choose from.   It would be interesting to see who would choose the polite option and just block the Facebook posts so they don’t get annoyed by them and who would unfriend that person altogether as a passive aggressive way to end their friendship and show their distaste for their posts.  I saw on Facebook after the election where someone posed the question asking if anyone had lost friends because of their political beliefs and several commented that they had noticed that they had been unfriended by several people.