When most people hear the phrase “public speaking”, they immediately become a little more tense or nervous. When I found out I had to take a public speaking course for my major, that was exactly my reaction. However, this course wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be.

I think one of the major reasons why this course wasn’t as terrifying is because I had a good professor. She was very helpful in teaching us ways to better perform when public speaking. She assigned us chapters to read from two books for the semester. One was an online textbook that had various material on public speaking and the other was a hard copy book that contained some tips and funny stories involving public speaking. With the use of both of these books and what was covered in class, I learned a lot about how to effectively speak in front of others.

This course is required for Communications Studies majors, but honestly, I would recommend all students to take it, regardless of their major. No matter what career path a student chooses, public speaking is involved one way or another. Learning how to present yourself and your information to a crowd or group of people is a crucial skill to have. Now, I’m no expert on public speaking but by taking this course I learned many tips and tricks on how to better present myself in front of people and portray some sort of message.

In the above image, is one of outlines from my last speech in this course. We were told to inform our audience on a specific person, place, thing or event. I chose to inform my peers on the celebrity, Sadie Robertson. For this speech, it was strictly informative, meaning I wasn’t supposed to persuade my audience to like Sadie Robertson, I was just supposed to tell them about her. That’s one very important aspect of this course, your speeches have to relative to the prompt and portray your information accordingly, because it is possible to give a great speech but to do it so incorrectly because you didn’t follow the prompt.

Throughout the semester taking this course, I really believe I greatly strengthened my skill of public speaking. I am very glad I took this course because I think it will be very useful in all of my future endeavors.