Advantages of Taking a Public Speaking Class

Have you ever thought of taking a public speaking class in school? If you haven?t I highly suggest that you do because it will increase your ability to communicate with other human beings and just make it easier. Today, I will be talking about a couple of abilities that you can greatly improve by taking a simple introductory course in public speaking. I will be talking about the importance of a good attention getter, a clear presentation of your points, and eye contact with the audience.

First, I will talk to you about the importance of a good attention getter, but before I can do that I will need to explain what an attention getter is. An attention getter is the very first words that exit from your mouth in a speech and these words are used to captivate the audience?s attention and make them believe that your speech is going to be worth listening to. Now you might ask why is this important. This is essential in your speech because the worst thing that can happen in a speech that you are giving is for someone to fall asleep or to have people totally ignoring what you have to say after you spent a lot of time coming up with all your information.

Now, I will talk about the importance of introducing your points clearly. This part of your speech is called the preview. The preview is basically a list of all your main ideas of the speech in the introduction. For example, if your speech is about baseball your preview might go like this: today I will be talking about the history of baseball, the highly talented players and some of the great records that will never be broken. The preview is vital because it presents your ideas clearly and to the point. It?s very bad when at the end of your speech the audience has no clue what you were trying to say or what material you were presenting.

The last fundamental idea that you will learn by taking a public speaking class is the importance of eye contact. Eye contact is pretty self-explanatory in that it is basically looking at your audience for about 60-75% of your speech. According to Samovar Mills, our eyes are capable of sending innumerable messages. They can show what type of emotional state we are in and they can prove that we are sincere about our topic. Eye contact is a very little thing in a speech, but it will let you know how your audience is reacting to your speech and that will tell you what you need to do for the rest of your speech to grab their attention.

Today I talked about a few of the important techniques that you will learn by taking a general public speaking class. I talked about the importance in having a great attention getter, why a preview of your main points are important, and how the use of eye contact can send ?hidden messages? and that it allows for the speaker to examine his or her audience?s reaction to their speech. After telling you about these few concepts, I hope that next quarter you will find it very beneficial to take at least one public speaking class because it WILL improve your communication with other human beings and according to Megan Mahoney, ?You can not not communicate?.