COMM 101- Fundamentals of Public Speaking
Audience Adaptation Paper
February 18, 2013 In the TED video that I watched, the subject was about “Body Language” and was twenty-one minutes and three seconds long, but the speaker stopped officially talking at twenty minutes and fifty-four seconds into the video. The speaker, Amy Cuddy, had very interesting points about how a person’s power pose, powerful/ prideful or curled into a ball and timid, can influence themselves on how they think and feel about themselves. She also made the point that our bodies change our minds and that power posing for a few minutes really change your life in a meaningful way. Throughout the video I was a little unimpressed with her delivery on the subject. She did not seem to “do as she preached.” Her personal appearance was fine. She was dressed in all black except for her undershirt was teal which made her fade into the background except for her pop of color. She also hunched quite a bit and did not stand as properly or formally as other public speakers I have seen. Her body language was okay. When she showed what a power pose was, which was supposed to look like Wonder Woman, she did it not very convincingly and looked better and more “at home” doing a shy and timid pose. She did do a lot of walking up and down the stage to keep an eye on her audience and to keep them paying attention to her. This did work because when they would put the camera out to the audience, they were all intently in tune with what she was saying. Throughout the speech I did not feel much of a volume change until the end when she had gotten emotional with a story she chose to tell about herself and later on a student much like herself. This volume change is of course not a good one because you should not ever pick something to talk about that creates reoccurring feelings. This could make you really hard to understand through the crying or you could not be able to finish through your weeping.