7.8 Discussion and Activities

Just as an athlete will warm up and stretch before a race or game, a speaker needs to warm up. A good place to start is the face. These three exercises, as silly as they may seem while you are doing them, are a great way to help your face feel relaxed and free to express during your presentation. Having an animated face is one of the keys to being an engaged speaker.

1. Take the palms of your hands and gently massage your face, spending a little more time on your cheeks.
2. Imagine you have put the most sour candy in your mouth or there is a large vacuum an inch from your face and make your most intense pucker. Pucker your lips, suck in your cheeks and furrow your brow.
3. Imagine someone has flipped reverse on that vacuum now or that you are a dog sticking its head out of a fast-moving vehicle’s window. Make your best ‘blown away’ face. Widen your eyes, lift your brow, and open your mouth as wide as you can. You can use your hands to gently push back your cheeks, chin or forehead.

Just as an athlete will warm up and stretch before a race or game, a speaker needs to warm up. After you have warmed up your face (see exercise 7.1), you need to warm up your mouth to ward off stuttering and tripping over words. This exercise, as silly as it may seem while you are doing it, is a great way to help your mouth feel flexible and nimble.

In this exercise, you are simply going to repeat the phrase “the tip of the tongue, the roof of the mouth, the lips and the teeth” with increasing speed and overenunciating and exaggerating the face. Start by saying the phrase normally a few times to learn it. Then, begin to overenunciate. Now, while continuing to over-annunciate, exaggerating your face (lips and cheeks) as your mouth form the words. Finally, pick up speed. Gradually pick up speed until you cannot possibly say the phrase any faster. This is also a fun game to play with friends–who can say it the fastest without tripping over a word?

Find a sample informative or persuasive speech online or attend one in person if your university is hosting a speech tournament or conference. Here are a couple of interesting ones:

For and Against Presentation: Smart Phones

Problem-Solution Presentation: China’s One-Child Policy

Attempt to outline the content of the presentation using the three-part outline model (intro, body, conclusion).

• Introduction
  • Attention Getter
  • Statement of Topic/Thesis
  • Speaker Credibility
  • Relevance to Audience
  • Preview of Main Points
  • [transition to body}
• Body
  • Main Point 1
    • Claim, Explanation, Evidence, Citations
  • Main Point 2
    • Claim, Explanation, Evidence, Citations
  • Main Point 3
    • Claim, Explanation, Evidence, Citations
  • [transition to body}
• Conclusion
  • Restatement of Topic/Thesis
  • Review Main Points
  • Call to Action
  • Concluding Statement

When you use information that is not common knowledge, you will need to tell your audience where this information came from. You will provide an oral citation and include a written one on your visual presentation, if you have one. Access the following NACE article on eight competencies for a career-ready workforce and write a statement that summarizes an interesting point in each of them. Practice stating this point and providing an oral citation in the following format: author’s name, date and name of the publication.

Example, “Barrett and Helens-Hart found in their 2022 research article ‘The value of a liberal arts degree: Students’ perspectives on financial and nonfinancial returns on investment,’ that many liberal arts students at a large mid-western university did not have a clear idea of projected salaries for graduates with their degree.”