TED Talk

Good vs Bad Speeches

TED Talk

            There can be a thin line between a good and a bad speech but for the most part a bad speech can be spotted better than a good one. On TED talks there are both good and bad speeches. The speakers may not be talking about the same thing but it is possible that the speaker is doing the same thing a previous speaker did that made it a bad speech.

            So, in a bad speech there are many things that can go wrong, but the number one thing that can categorize a good speech from a bad speech is the beginning. The beginning of your speech must capture the audience, if it does not then the audience will be drifting off. One thing that I did see in “How to grow a tiny forest anywhere” by Shubhendu Sharma, is in the beginning he did not try to introduce the topic in ways like most do to grab your attention: examples are jokes, quotes, questions, and so on and so forth, but instead he went straight into his topic. Now, because he had a time limit on what he had to explain this could have been acceptable but because the beginning did not grab the audience attention the entire speech was less than affective. He jumped right into his topic but didn’t do it in a way that was inviting. Unlike in the Sally Kohn, “Don’t like clickbait. Don’t click it,” who started off by grabbing your attention with a story, she did this in a way that allowed the audience to stay captivated. The thing about most speeches is that people remember two things in a good speech the beginning and the end but in a bad speech they remember every little thing in between.

            Also, in a bad speech the content could be there but if it is not presented in a way that does not keeps the audience attention it won’t matter.  In the middle of the speech you tell all of your key points, you can show this by showing picture like in Shubhendu Sharma, “How to grow a tiny forest anywhere,” or you can tell jokes while giving the content so the audience does not get bored like in “Don’t like clickbait. Don’t click it,” by Sally Kohn. The middle is an important section but the one thing that most usually remember about the speech besides the middle is the end.

            The end of a speech is where many things can go wrong. An end has many possible ways to end it including going back over what you said, quotes, and other things. But since it is hard to tell you how to end it well, it isn’t hard to tell you how not to end it. Most bad endings can come from just not know what to say next so you just say “yeah, thanks,” or the classic “Okay, done.” Both of these mean the same thing you need to work on the ending. Luckily in the videos I saw the two speakers didn’t have bad ending which allowed the audience to focus on them as a whole.

            In both videos the speakers, moved around and used good hand movement. They also kept very good eye contact. But the speaker Shrama did a few things that the other didn’t do that I thought was very good, like when he showed pictures on the screen as he was speaking. They were at the right time and they were enhancing the speech and did not distract the audience. But he need to work on the introduction. But in the other video, the speaker, Kohn, she had a great introduction but it seemed some of the information was clouded when she told certain jokes. Jokes can be good and bad it warms your audience but if it goes over their head than it is not necessary and is space fillers.

            Both speaker did great jobs but they did have few mistakes that distracted the audience from the content of what they were talking about. Distractions are another indicator of a bad speech.

Works Cited

Khon, Sally. http://www.ted.com/talks/shubhendu_sharma_how_to_grow_a_tiny_forest_anywhere. 03 2014. 08 09 2014.

 

Sharma:, Shubhendu. http://www.ted.com/talks/sally_kohn_don_t_like_clickbait_don_t_click#t-8642. 07 2014. 08 09 2014.