Informative Speech Reflection

This speech from start to finsh seemed to be more difficult then I thought it would be.  From the beginning I couldn't think of anything that would interest me or the audience and had decided to go with how credit cards worked.  To be honest, I am sort of curious of how easy it is to obtain credit card information illegally, but at the same time I think the topic would not allow me to go to in depth.

The second idea I had in mind was a topic on the League of Legends esport as a whole.  I have been an avid player of the game for five years and feel that talking about anything league related would be easy for me.  The problem I had with this topic was that I believe people would not be so interested in a topic about games.  That's the sad part about this topic though, like many others I don't view League of Legends as a game, but rather a sport.  Quite possiblely by giving a speech about why League of Legends is a sport may have been able to pass as a good speech, but that leans over at persuasive rather than the informative.

Being a business major and wondering where future industries are heading, I already had a strong interest on the freemium model and wanted to know more.  It always boggled my mind to think that someone one day thought, we should give our product out for free.  Today, there are so many sucessful companies using the freemium model but the topic is not really touched upon at USC.  The only time I have heard of the idea of freemium was in a mini-seminar during my orientation, but they spoke of how to tackle a competitor with free products rather than embracing freemium.

When deliverying this speech I came in knowing everything I needed to say, but again the pressure cracked me and I kept forgeting what was next on my notecard.  Going off of that, I feel that having notecards was a double edged sword.  Because the cards were in front of me, I felt compelled to use them, but if they weren't there I might have paused for a pretty long time.  Half way through my speech I decide on a wimp and said to myself, "You know what, you wrote this speech and you've practiced this enough to know it", and so I put my note cards down only to pick them back up 2 minutes later.  I think when I am able to come into a speech with confidence is when I will be able to be happy with the results.  Until then I feel that these speeches represent me dipping my feet into the water and eventually I'll find the courage to just dive in without thinking.