Informative Speeches

This week was a little crazy.  I went to the World Congress of Families Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah.  I didn't have a whole lot of time to re-record my speech and unfortunately ran out of time to listen to others speeches.  I worked really hard last week trying to get my homework done for last week and this week. Needless to say it was a lot of really late nights trying to get everything finished.  While I didn't get to watch others speeches from class I spent my time up in Salt Lake watching speeches.  I learned a lot about speech giving.  I don't know if it was because of this class that I was super intrigued with the speeches, but I didn't find them interesting.  Some people used teleprompters, others just had a few note cards, others seemed to have nothing at all and still gave a fluent speech, and then there was some that read them almost completely, and yet others that seemed to be reading their notes from a big screen TV that wasn't visible to the audience.  The person that just read his talk, I kept hoping that he would raise his head, but he never really did.  Those that didn't have any notes were seen with lots of body language, including Nick Vujicic, who has no arms or feet.  Even without a few crucial limbs, he was super animated and got super excited.  He was bouncing on his little table, and moving his shoulder stubs to drive a point across.  One lady just had simple notes cards that were about 5x7 size.  I thought she did a great job.  There was a Greek Orthodox preacher there and he didn't relate well with his audience.  Because I'm not a Greek Orthodox, I didn't understand the lingo that he used.  It was fascinating to watch all the different speech presenters.  Another good presenter(s) was Richard and Linda Eyre.  They even came with big huge visuals (Big, gold guardians) that grabbed everyone's attention.  Not to mention they were giving away free books to be given out at the end.  However everyone heard "free" and rudely went out during the next speaker talk, afraid that they weren't going to get their free book.  (There was only 500 books for a crowd of 2,700.)  I liked the speeches that had visuals.  By the end of the conference my eyes were bugging out of my head because there was 3 huge, bright screens that we were staring at all day long.  With that being said, in speech making, those might not be the best idea.  If you need to use screens to see the speakers better, dull the background so it isn't so stark and hard on the eyes.  I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to go to this conference, and be a silent listener to different styles of speeches.