Leasons learned from speech preparing

I delivered my second Toasmaster prepared speech last night at the Gunpowder room, 4F, Sigma building. According to my boss' request, I chose the topic that I talked in previous IEG brownbag meeting.To make this happen, I tailored the PPT and the script and also did a lot of practice before the meeting.

But, the feedback from my evaluator and other meeting attendees show that there are still many things that I should improve next time.

The first one is my pronunciation and speed. Many people say that I spoke too fast and make the pronunciation not very clear, and also make it very hard for the audiences to understand the content of my speech.

The second one is that I only gave those dry theories, no vivid real world case studies. It will be more interesting if I can mix study cases with theories together.

I know these two problems the speech, they came out on purpose, not by accident. It's just because I don't have enough time to show all the content that I could afford. I prepared a lot of case studies and practiced giving my speech in normal speed. But as every prepared speech can only last for about 5-7 minutes, I have to cut off those real world stories and speed up my speech. It seems that I made some mistakes when I made this decision. I should have reduced the number of dry theories and keep more case studies, just give up those that dose not matter so much.

But I also got some positive feedbacks from this speech.

I added interesting pictures into my PPT slides and had good content organization. Nearly every body said they like them it's a really positive feedback! I know why people like it and what characteristics normal people expected on speech PPT slides.

Another thing is that I did a lot of preparation and practices before giving the speech in front of so many members. So in the live meeting,my speech seems fluent. And also, I delivered everything that I prepared, nothing left, and have very good time control on this speech. If you try your best to do something, you will make it. This feeling improves my confidence.

The last thing is that, I sent my script to dwight, the english editor of MSRA, to review it. He gave me detailed feedbacks and comments, I really appreciate them and learned a lot from them. For example, what's the proper format and structure of formal speech script, how to split complex sentences into simple ones. Proper words to use in oral English etc.

In a word, there is still long way to go, but the future seems bright! Thanks everyone who gave me helpful feedback.

Keep fighting ......