Making our language more effective was the topic that drove class work and activities this week. We discussed the particular speech elements of attention getting and closing statements, preview and summary statements, and purpose statements that all work to cue our listeners on HOW to hear us. Effective language is not only the way we organize our speech, however; our speech also relies on our word choices being clear, correct, vivid, and appropriate. Thus, students spent the week thinking of words that are difficult to pronounce and/or enunciate (NOT pronunciate!), defining words, learning the variety of sensory images we can use and collecting words that work to create these images, and thinking of words and types of language to avoid.
We finished the week reviewing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech to listen to his language and learn about alliterative and parallel structuring techniques that can help us communicate our messages more effectively.
As we move into our final Informative speech assignment, students will be expected to begin to explicitly use the devices we have been discussing.
