Year 7 Public Speaking

In Term 1 all year 7 students presented a persuasive speech. The goal of the assignment was to form a speech that persuaded the audience about a certain topic. The teachers who were grading our work and picking someone to go onto round two, were looking for someone who engaged the audience as well as persuaded them. All students’ speeches were supposed to be about two minutes.

Before we started researching and planning our speeches, we explored different persuasive techniques. Some of the different techniques we investigated were: emotive language, which are a selection of words chosen to provoke an emotional response and anecdotes, which are stories used to inspire the listener to think deeper about the topic. We were given time to come up with a topic and research it. It was recommended that the topic be something that you support and are familiar with. You want the topic to be interesting and exciting. When researching our topics, we gathered evidence that we later used in our speeches.

After we were comfortable with our topics we started writing. When the final draft of our speeches had been made it was time to memorize them. Finally, the big day came, the day when we presented our speeches to the class. The teachers were grading us on the topic we chose, the evidence we provided, how persuasive we were, our introductions and close, our eye contact and body language, and our pace and voice. After everyone had presented their speech the teacher decided who made it to the second round. Only one person from each class made it.

On the last day of Term 1, in the auditorium, the people chosen for round two presented their speech to a panel of judges, as well as the entire year 7. There were many different topics presented such as the winning topics: ‘Students should not have homework’, ‘women’s rights’ and ‘why schools should have 15 minutes of exercise at the end of each period’. The audience was very supportive of their fellow classmates with lots of loud cheering. Even though it was a competition everyone was encouraging of one another. Then, the judges picked three people to go onto the next round. The winners were Elodie Dillion, Jessica Edbrooke, and Ella Francis. The three years 7 students will be going up against year 8 and 9 students. Good Luck to those students!

Gigi Boyd 7M2