Personal Strengths and Weaknesses Essay Example

In this essay, I will be talking about my strengths and weaknesses I had throughout the duration of my physical speech along with the planning and outlining needed for it. First, I will be talking about my strengths I had in my speech. Secondly, I will be talking about the weaknesses I noticed with the speech. And lastly, I like be giving a step-by-step plan on how I will be changing my speech to be better next time. 

To start out I will be talking about my strengths that were within my speech. First, I think my best strength in my speech as a whole was my organization. On paper, I organized the speech by starting out talking about social security benefits and how they are depleting giving evidence and reasoning to why they should open a retirement account. Then, I began to talk about what Roth IRA’s are and how they work. Then talked what a traditional IRA is and how they work. Personally, I would say my outline was very easy to follow while I was giving the speech, this goes along with my timing. My speech was roughly five minutes because my outline was organized very well.. Another thing I thought was strong in my speech was my source citations and my physical delivery. I cited every citation I needed to and said it correctly, to my knowledge. Along with that I believe my voice level was at a good volume to where everyone could hear me without a trouble. Another thing I thought I did well on my physical delivery was my gestures, my hands weren’t glues to the podium nor were they down my side the whole speech.

Now I'll be talking about the weaknesses within my speech. I think the greatest weakness from my speech is the filler words that I used. I beleive I used filler words because I didn’t know how to transition properly from one topic to the other, because, I had weak transition on my outline. The next thing I could improve on is the explanation of my visual aid, that was the part of the speech I think that I struggled with the most, delivery wise Because I didn't practice enough. Lastly, I think that I should’ve focused more on my main points, being Roth IRA and Traditional IRA accounts instead of explaining in depth on why we should start an account now as college students.

The first step I am going to take to make my next speech better is do more research and use the websites on the library site within titan web. The only problem I ran into for my informative speech was finding relevant information and having it be credible by the year of publication. I could find these sources because I didn't take the time to find them So for my next speech, I will take more time to look for my sources in the library website with in titan web, so I don’t find myself in the same situation as last time. The second step I want to take to make this speech better is to make sure I have three good main topics. For my last speech I think I talked a little bit to much on social security benefits and how it’s depleting. Even though this was good information, it wasn’t my main topic. This time, I will make plenty of room for my three strong main topics in the body of my speech, and focus more on them. This goes along with too long of an introduction, focusing on three main topics will decrease the chances of having a really long introduction because I have to keep time, so more information to get through in the body means the introduction has to be shorter to stay within the time limit preemptors. The next step I’m taking to improve my next speech is practicing my speech with the visual aids more then I did with my informative speech. For my delivery i fell  this was the part  I struggled on the most. Even though I just had to describe what I saw, it was difficult in the moment. So, for next time, I’m going to practice with the visual aids to get comfortable with describing them during my speech. The next thing I’m going to change for my next speech is my transitions. I had transitions in my outline but they just weren’t strong enough. So, this time I’m going to put more effort into finding better transitions that correlate with what I finished talking about to what I’m about to talk about. The last step I am taking to better my future speeches is to work on is being more confident. Not being confident in myself made me look down at more key-word/ key-phase outline more then I needed Creating involuntary filler words my worst being 'um'.

All in all, as I feel my speech was pretty good, it definitely wasn’t the best but it wasn’t the worst. By all means no speech is prefect, but I felt I did the best I could at the time. To wrap up, I talked about the strengths, the weaknesses, and then I gave a step- by-step on how I’m going to use this experience to better myself for my next speech.