Eric Pinashin: Craigslist Sensory Aid Speech

Good Afternoon Students and Cynthia of Comm 204,

Well, I guess this was a bittersweet ending of my speech days in Comm 204, but I'm glad that I went out and did my speech in a way which I enjoyed. I definitely enjoyed this speech out of all my speeches, and I hope that you felt the same way too.

At first, I wanted to present my entrepreneurial hobby in a PowerPoint format, but was then later inspired to not have a single PowerPoint slide, and wanted to get the audience in the driver seat on how I actually buy and sell cars. The 2 vehicles which I found on Craigslist and on CarMax were not found beforehand, and were found on the moment of my presentation. The reason why I had included CarMax in my presentation, was because I wanted to have it as a comparison to Craigslist prices, which  I think ended up working nicely in the end. I think I was able to grab the audiences attention by shifting away from a traditional PowerPoint, and by addressing my first hand experience and knowledge of the topic. Asides from presenting an informative topic, I wanted to throw in some facts for the audience to be able to digest and appreciate along with my topic. Even though our speeches are supposed to be narrow on a particular topic, I felt that this slight deviations brought an extra touch to my speech which hopefully made it more memorable.

I think that this speech had a few more negatives than positives, so I will try to keep it short and to the point. First, I completely forgot the order and facts that I wanted to present to the audience, but hopefully after I regained composure, that the audience was still able to appreciate the facts I presented, even though they were not in the order that I had anticipated. Second, I had my back turned to the audience a few times when I was engaged in my searches on Craigslist, which could have probably disengaged the audience, and could have easily been fixed with me wearing my glasses so I could've saw the screen being illuminated by the projector. Third, I felt that that my order of presentation was a bit off, and threw the audience off a bit, especially with my presentation of the pink slip and CarFax in the hyperlink. And finally, I should have probably showed images of some of the vehicles I sold, and should've shared a few personal stories when I sold my vehicles, but once again, I ran out of time and was not able to get around to the slightly more interesting parts of my speech that I wanted to get to.

I hope that everyone in the class was able to enjoy my speech, because I sure was able to enjoy everyone's awesome speeches :). Everybody did an amazing job, and I was able to see the progress since the beginning of the semester (not that anyone did bad on their first speeches :) ).

Thank you everyone for an awesome semester of speeches, and thank you Cynthia for an awesome semester of mentorship and for your awesome speeches that you delivered to us :)

Thanks,

Eric Pinashin