Week 14

Week 14 was devoted to the presentation of your speeches. I have little to report on this other than most of you did a great job. I did see an effort to integrate rhetorical elements in your speeches and an improvement on your delivery. There was also a lot of creativity in the contexts and situations chosen and the topics dealt with. On the other hand, many of you still have to deal with your shyness and fear of public speaking. Too much reading and looking at the page instead of the audience and little gesture was present in many of the presentations.

Next week we will work on documentaries.

Week 12

Are there some common characteristics to great speakers and presenters? What is it that makes them so compelling? Is there a common pattern to great speeches and communications? According to Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte Design in Silicon Valley the answer is “Yes”.

Nancy Duarte says that the best spoken genre, the one that resonates in audiences and lingers in time, is story. She claims that great communications (either speeches or presentations) follow patterns that are similar to the patterns of great stories. After making her point, she comes with a “shape” of great speeches and she walks us through this shape using two great models of American speakers and some of their most famous public addresses. Here’s her presentation at TED:



Remember, effective speeches mimic the pattern of great stories, but you, the speaker, are not the hero, but the mentor and you have to try to convince the audience they are the heroes. At the level of structure you have to come back and forward between the status quo and the ideal and better future. This applies for commercial presentation (competitors vs. your product) as well as political speeches (the author candidate vs. “me”).

Then we proceeded with the next genre in our syllabus: movies. Movies can be defined in different ways. We can say that a movie is a sequence of pictures in motion that narrates a story or that a movie is an audiovisual text that present a piece of fiction (these definitions were given by you in class). Movies can be classified by genres (action, horror, comedy, etc.) or by the age of the intended audience (PG, PG-13, R) or even by the kind of producers (commercial movies vs. independent movies). As other narrative, movies have a main character with a desire or problem, there is a climax or a crucial event that turns the character’s world upside-down and then a resolution, after which the character is transformed. We also looked at some of the ways in which meanings and emotions are conveyed in movies through music, lighting, cinematography and other visual elements.

Friday. we started watching the movie assigned for this semester: Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange . Although this movie is quite old, I think you will notice the validity of many of the points it makes and how current its topic and technical style is. I leave you with its trailer:

Week 11

In this week we closed the topic of humor with an example of a classic American joke (who's on first?) and with some smaple clips from two very popular sitcoms that Katie brought to class.

Then we moved to speeches as another genre of oral texts. We discussed the different types and purposes of speeches and its main characteristics. Speeches are usually example of public speaking, they are planned and are related to the special social event in which they are produced. For example, a commencement address occurs in a graduation act at college; while a political speech might occur in the context of an election campaign. Some speeches have the aim of being inspirational, others are intended to thank people, but most have a persuasive purpose. Some may have more than one purpose.

In class we studied and discussed two speeches that are considered exemplary in English rhetoric: Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stratford University and Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech”. Here’s the video of the “I have a dream” speech.

                              
Next week, we will took a more analitic view of speeches and close this topic. After that, we will start our next genre, movies.

See you next class.