Belmont Speech Lab held a contest on informative speech in fall 2008, one of the topics discussed by one of the ale speaker is about the cause of homelessness. At the start of the speech the speaker presented his topic in a straight forwards manner with a personal overview of the reality of this topic in everyday living. The topic evolves around the facts, causes and effects of homelessness in the United States. According to the speaker there are about three million people in America who do not have their own homes and ends up at the bus stop, subway stations and back street corners.
The arguments was supported by facts from the National Coalition for the Homeless and it was mentioned clearly in the presentation that the cause of homelessness are poverty derived from being unemployed and having no health insurance. Furthermore, the effect of homelessness was briefly discussed which points to dehumanization. The speech is only five minutes and 26 seconds long, but all the important responses were discussed in that short time limit. The person who gave the presentation about the topic won second place in the competition. The presentation looks impressive overall but there are a few thing that should have been done in order to make it more compelling. The video can be found in the popular video sharing website You Tube. I was uploaded on November 8, 2008 by Belmont Speech Lab. The speaker used the informative approach in delivering the speech which is more contextual in nature because this kind of speech style needs extensive research to be able to justify facts.
The Causes of Homelessness
The main subject of the speech is about the cause of homelessness and what are the main reasons behind it. The purpose of knowing the causes in this issue is to inform the greater public of the reality that the homeless people are facing and how the societies in general respond to this issue. This subject looks interesting in the sense that it tackles a real issue happening rampantly and the relevance of taking it to the public is to promote awareness and serve as a wake up call that this problem is real and it needs solution. The interest on the subject evidently sows on how the speaker delivers his words. It has conviction and a slight feed of emotion, which makes it effective in making the audience to be more engaged in the subject. Now, is it worth the time talking about this issue? Definitely, because not all individual understands why homeless individuals end up in the streets; people should understand the circumstances that homeless people are facing. The way the facts were delivered is narrow and precise enough for the audience to understand the message.
Overall the speech was able to keep itself in line with subject, it didn’t deviate in any way to another subject which if so would create confusion on which suppose to be the thesis topic is. The main point were attacked precisely how it should be, because the main key point such as the mentioning about poverty as one of the causes in the issue were delivered straight with supporting facts from a credible source. The thesis used adequate amount of researching and to prove that, the speaker used information from a reliable source which is the National Coalition for the Homeless to emphasize evidence that there are currently three million homeless people in America. One of the noticeable things about the speech though is that no matter where the facts came from it should have been properly reference. In one instance the speaker gave a scenario to demonstrate the effects of homelessness which is being dehumanized, the given scenario depicts the thought accounted for the effects being explained, but the speaker wasn’t able to mention where is he got the case situation from and that is a failure to reference source of facts.
The good side of this speech is the way the speaker showed his understanding of the issue and the thoughts are well organized, although he could have demonstrated it more by avoiding to read from the slide presentation and explain rationales from his own words. We can give credits on this speech by having an introduction of the topic by mentioning a few norms of how the society looks at homeless people, but it lacked conclusion in the end because the speaker delivered a question rather than elaborating more on the conclusive statements. The introduction is one of the strong points of the speech to gain attention from the audience and the speaker as successful on that part. He was able to do so by citing examples on the people’s attitudes towards homeless people. Effective transitional phrases were used to connect the audience to the next phase of the presentation by asking simple questions to shift to another key point of the subject.
During the presentation, the speaker showed confidence although out his speech the body posture is at the right position to no unnecessary movements and does hand gestures. Enthusiasm towards the presentation is evident because of his tone and rate of his speech which is at normal that audience can easily follow through. He speaks at the right volume for the audience to hear across the room, not too loud and not too soft and the he speaks on a normal voice range, not monotone or does not sound robotic.
The speaker in the speech video used video equipment such as overhead projector to display the slide he prepared from a computer, he also used a clicker controller to navigate trough the slide presentation without going back and forth to the computer to go through each slides. The visual and presentation aids were effectively used during the speech because it made the whole presentation organized and professional. For example, the use of a projector allows the audience to have a visual display of what the speaker is talking about. It would be difficult for an audience to follow through a speech by hearing and looking at the speaker alone, whereas using visual aids can make the audience review the elements of the subject by reading it through the visual display.
Conclusion
Overall the speech was indeed informative and somewhat delivered in a compelling way, but there are few points that should have been done to improve the overall experience. One of them is referencing, being able to deliver evidential facts to support arguments may not be sufficient to make a claim of truth, furthermore citing or rather mentioning the source of the fact could have made his claims more credible especially on the last part while the speaker is explaining the his justifications on the effects. One more improvement point that can be improved is the lack of statistical data, adding statistics to factual claims can substantiate pertinent points of the subject in addressing current status of the issue and also to justify the means for solution. The speaker could have cited more effect examples for the subject rather limiting to jut one which is dehumanization. In general it was still informative, short and precise speech that was able to target the key point of the subject.
References
Belmont Speech Lab (November 8, 2008) Informative Speech: "The Causes of Homelessness" Video. Web Retrieved February 14, 2012 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XeDDG4UqUQ
