Purpose: This assignment gives you a chance to practice preparing and presenting a speech and to receive feedback from the audience. You will get feedback on your speech from the instructor and your classmates.
Overview: The narrative speech is essentially a speech which tells a story. Narrative speeches often deal with a personal experience. We hear this kind of speech from athletes, missionaries, and business leaders, who often have very interesting personal stories to tell. For this assignment, you will also be telling a story or describing personal experience.
Preparation Instructions: Prepare a 3-minute speech, outlining your major points on your personal notebook paper. You may choose to do one of the following:
- Describe a vivid experience. The goal is to pick some incident that touched you intensely that was funny, interesting, and/or embarrassing.
- Tell a traditional story, legend, or poem. (traditional Iktomi stories only-not contemporary)
- Your own story, essay, or poem.
- The Vivid Experience Speech
In this speech, you should recount an event which made a profound impression on you. It may have taught you something about life, helped you grow in some way, or changed the way you think about something, someone, or some issue. Think of something which significantly shaped you as person.
Surviving a tornado
Saving a life
Reaching a long-held goal
Overcoming a fear or obstacle
Spending time living in another culture
Going to boot camp
Optional: It sometimes is effective to bring in an object that is visually symbolic of your experience, to serve as a visual aid during your speech.
- Traditional Stories, Legends, Poems
In this speech, you will tell a story, legend, or poem in the way you heard it…as per the oral tradition of the Lakota people…by not adding or taking anything away. These may be stories or legends that you have heard from elders in your family.
Delivery Instructions: Your primary goal should be to project a lively, enthusiastic style with lots of eye contact. Do not read your speech. Rehearse and time yourself delivering your speech to be sure you can stay within the time limit. Make sure your speech has an effective beginning, a good body and a clear conclusion.
Sample Vivid Experience Speech
(Note: This is longer than what I require of you)
Introduction: Speaker I grew up in a little town called Brunswick in
provides background Maine. Up in Maine, hunting is a popular sport,
essential to the point of the and so it was sort of natural that my father and I
story. He sets the scene for were avid hunters. We use to go out every other
us. day during the season.
Thesis: Although not stated The last year I lived in Maine was my sophomore
directly, the speaker clearly year in high school. My parents had divorced and
implies that his pattern is my father was living in New Jersey. The only
narrative and that he wants chance we had to go hunting was the last day of
to share with the audience the season. We knew this might be our last
new understanding. hunting trip together in the woods.
What we did not know was that this trip would
bring us closer together than we had ever been
before, and it would teach me a lesson I would
never forget.
Language: The speaker’s style We had a ritual: up at 3:00 a.m., off to Dunkin
is more colloquial than it might Donuts, then out to the woods. We’d spend the
be for a speech of a more morning hunting, get lunch, and then go back to
serious nature. A narrative is a the woods until 4:15, the official end of the
less formal pattern of public hunting day. On this last trip, we got dressed up
speaking, and so the language in our boots, long underwear, and heavy pants.
can often be more casual without Then quietly, so as not to wake my mother and
becoming incorrect. sister, we loaded up the truck and headed
off to the place my father humorously called
“Drucken Donuts,” because of some of the people
we would meet at that time of the morning.
Language: Notice the phrases Arriving at the donut shop, we slogged down a
and words used to get from couple of cups of coffee, three donuts each, and
event to event. The speaker listened to the stories of other hunters, most of
avoids overusing such words which were about the big eight-pointer that had
as next and then. eluded their sights, or the friend who was nearly
laced with buckshot but an overanxious
weekend Daniel Boone. When we left the shop
it was about 5:00 a.m. and just a five-minute
ride to the preserve.
Actual hunting starts at 6:00 a.m., so we couldn’t
up our guns till then. My dad was a stickler for
the rules of hunting, always telling me, “If the
deer can’t cheat, neither can we.” When we
finally walked into the woods we immediately
came upon a scrape that had been made by the
deer. It was about one foot square.
Language: The speaker For those of you who don’t know what a scrape
defines terms he feels may be is, I’d better tell you. The deer scrapes off the
unclear to the audience. Such topsoil—I should say the buck—and then urinates
brief digressions are acceptable in the middle. This marks off the buck’s
in a narrative. territory. My father decided to hunt about fifty
yards away from the scrape in hopes of getting
a shot at a doe or another buck coming to
investigate the scrape. I walked about two
Notice that the speaker hundred yards up the trail that led to the scrape
relates feelings as well as hoping to get a shot at a deer from that vantage
events, so that the audience point. Well, I sat there for about three hours,
has a full picture of the listening to the squirrels above me making all
experience. Sorts of noise, as if to warn the deer that I was
there. It reached 11:00 a.m., so I decided to go see
what Dad had accomplished, and, as expected, he
had seen nothing. We left for lunch.
Lunch was nothing more than a cup of soup and a
donut at the same shop we had visited in the
morning. The same men were there, telling the
same stories about tracks and scrapes and rustling
in the bushes—but not one deer had been shot.
Dad said, “If this was baseball, Bruce, the deer would have a shutout right now.”