Speech Time

Cutter's Log - Stardate 0102.80.40

I had my Policy Speech last night in Speech class. It was about the college football playoffs. I advocated for a college football playoff bracket.

The speech was something I worked on starting on Monday. In the two days I conducted research and wrote about things I knew about it, apparently I conducted too much research. Now this doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. I was assigned this speech two weeks ago. If I worked on it two weeks ago, I would have had WAY too much, right?

The post-speech critique made me realize a couple of things, since I went a couple of minutes over the maximum time limit (11:00):

1) I had too much to talk about. This was a topic that seemed to only interest the small part of the class that likes college football (and this includes my young female instructor). I sort of knew this coming in, and spent some time trying to explain a connection. Turns out I didn't explain enough - and if I did, it would have made me go more over the time limit.

I also didn't really find anything to cut out of the speech, except maybe the list of representatives to contact.

2) I talk slow. That's the nature of how I communicate, which is far different from the way everyone else does it. I felt if I were to speed up, I would stumble more often.

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The next speech is the Value Speech (don't know what that really is), and is 9-11 minutes long, so I even went over the limit for this speech. So I don't really know what fix. Condensing the information, or talking faster?

I finished writing this particular speech on Wednesday morning. I was tired, so I took a nap. I woke up and had to then immediately put it in power point form by 4:30 that afternoon. That now tells me one important thing: I didn't have enough time to edit it. That's a sign to begin working on the speech more earlier, so that I have enough time to edit it. The key thing is while editing it, I can actually find the things to chop down.

Chopping down things is hard to do with a Cody Cutter work. Just ask anyone who has edited my stories for SVN and the college newspapers. Take one small thing out, and the whole piece looks ruined. I think my flow is too strong.

Overall, I don't think the research is a problem. It's just editing.

(On a totally unrelated side note - for some reason there were two songs stuck in my head while writing this speech and presenting it. Those two songs were ZZ Top's "I Thank You" and Fleetwood Mac's "Gold Dust Woman." Why, I don't know.)