Prescription Drug Abuse Persuasive Speech: Eric Pinashin

Good afternoon Everybody,

Well, after the presentation of my second speech in Comm 204, I feel that I have made some steps forward to becoming a better public speaker since the inception of the class. Since this was a persuasive speech, the approach was a bit different in the context that we had to find strong arguments to try and persuade our audience to side with our beliefs. In essence, this was a combination of both an informative speech, with an included component of persuasion.

Once I began to delve into my topic of prescription drug abuse, I had the facts and research to make people second guess the pharmaceutical industry and it's safety, but the road block I kept encountering was, what am I truly trying to persuade my audience of? Since I am going into the pharmaceutical industry, and I know more than a handful of people who have prescription drug abuse problems, the credibility and passion was there, but I needed to work on a stance. I ran multiple arguments through my head, and once I settled on persuading my audience of tighter regulations on opioids and narcotics, as well as inform patients and doctors on the abuse potential of these strong opioids.

I first worked on my weaknesses from my previous informative speech presentation, and wanted to eliminate previous errors. I shortened the amount of slides from 21 slides, to 10 slides, then, I talked in a  slower manner, so the audience could understand me more clearly, and finally, I did not wave the keyboard around, and set it down on the table in front of me. I tried not to inundate the audience with countless statistics, but took the most significant statistics which I found, and tried to explain it to the audience, in order for them to understand the significance I am trying to convey. I felt that the subject matter was interesting to the audience, and I did not see anybody that seemed bored by the subject, so I was happy that I had the audience listening to what I had to say.

Time to start with the improvements. Even though I reduced the amount of slides in my presentation as opposed to my first speech, I still fell a bit short of time, probably due to my slower manner of speaking, which made me speed up towards the end, and probably lost the audience a little bit with some of the facts and stats that I was discussing. Second, I had a few times in between slides where instead of staying quiet, I would say a personal comment on how I felt about the topic, which I felt was slightly inappropriate, but I did not want there to be an awkward silence during the presentation. And finally, I could have explained some of the statistics in a little bit less detail, which would have given me more time to allocate for the topics towards the end of my presentation.

Overall, I felt that this was an improvement over my first speech, and I learned that I do not need to submerge the audience with as much information as possible, but that I need to pick the most important topics, and elaborate on them, in order to not lose the audience, and to be able to keep the attention of the audience for a longer period of time.

I am looking forward to everyone's visual aid speech, and I wanted to say congratulations to everyone on their persuasive speech, everybody did a great job! :)

Have a great weekend.

Eric Pinashin