Jessica's Blog

As a public speaker, Jean Kilbourne is extremely talented. She informs her audience, she effectively attempts to persuade them, and also entertains them with funny anecdotes and ads along the way. Because she does all of this and then some, Kilbourne fulfills the 3 general purposes for public speaking. She also fits almost all of the competencies believed to make a speech great. For example, Kilbourne recognizes that her audience (at least at the time of the recording) was a college audience, and her speech seems that to fit her audience well. She is also very convincing at what she says, employs an adept arrangement of visual aids, and uses clear organization in her speech. The only competency that I wasn’t sure that she accomplished was well-supported ideas. Although many of her claims had evidence for support, some of her claims also seemed to have fallacies within them. For example, Kilbourne points out that because women’s bodies are “de-humanized” and are taught to be perceived as items, violence against women seems to be the “logical result”. In my opinion, this an example of a slippery slope. Despite a few fallacies, however, I really enjoyed Kilbourne’s speech and thought it was effective.

Two things that I observed about today’s impromptu speeches were that, for the most part, many people held good eye contact with their audience. This allowed me to feel more connected as a listener to what they were saying. I also observed that many people tried to incorporate humor into what they were saying, which allowed me to be more attentive and also made the speeches more memorable for me.