NIU

Speech Class

Posted by Stacy on Tuesday, February 03, 2009 12:11 PM

I go too Ball State University and we recently had the David Letterman building put into our school (he is an alumni which he talks about a lot if you watch his show) which is now the communication building. Everyone is required to take a speech class (I think it's like comm. 210 or something like that) in order to graduate. So my sophomore year I took it with a few of my friends. We had a huge lecture that met just once a week on Mondays and then on Tuesdays and Thursdays we met with smaller groups and a teaching assistant and that's where we learned more about speaking and did our speeches.

In the larger lecture though on Mondays we would have people come in and speak to us and then we would evaluate them and their style in our smaller groups later that week and learn more. One time we had a motivational business keynote speaker come in and talk about affordable family health insurance. So then the next few days in class we had to talk about how he spoke, his style and what he did while he was speaking (whether he walked around or used his hands or even whether or not he involved his audience). And then surprisingly our teacher made an announcement that we too would have to do a speech about affordable family health insurance. That surprised us because usually we had a more broad topic, like hobbies or something like that and then we would get to pick our own subject within those guidelines. So we were all pretty scared because we didn't know very much about affordable family health insurance at all.

This class really did help me to prepare for the future. It made me less afraid to talk out loud and prepared me for interviews for jobs and even just my sorority's recruitment and getting the word out. I am now able to feel more comfortable talking about subjects that I don't know much about because we had to do that in our class (and David Letterman even came that week and sat in on classes). I can now understand why the university has made this class a requirement for graduation. It really has helped to prepare me (and a lot of other people I know that took it so far) for our future no matter what we end up doing.