Public Reflection on Public Speaking

My only major experience with public speaking before this class was in high school, two years ago, in a public speaking class helpfully named Public Speaking. When I started that class, I was totally unacquainted with the skills needed to deliver speeches successfully, and this caused my performance to suffer greatly at first. The class did help me to do a better job at both composing and delivering speeches; however, it is fairly plain to me that I still have a lot of work to do now.

Overall, I think that I do all right when it comes to composing speeches. When I write essays for various classes, those tend to do all right. The main issue there is that good essay-writing does not always translate to good speech-writing, which means that when writing speeches I tend to go on too long about some points, cut other points short, and occasionally leave things out entirely if I have trouble expressing them in spoken form, which is often. It would probably help if I practiced speeches more while working on them, so that I can figure out what parts need more or less attention and what I can add within the timeframe.

On the other hand, my delivery is a mess. Anybody who has tried to communicate with me can tell that it is difficult for me to even maintain a normal conversation, and anybody who has not tried to communicate with me cannot tell anything about my delivery because it is also difficult for me to start a normal conversation. Obviously, this does not bode well for having to coherently present ideas in front of a large audience. Feedback for my first speech in this class noted problems with eye contact, physicality, verbal fillers, and emphasizing important words. Again, practicing more might help to alleviate these problems.

Animation In Motion

"Over the past fifty years, the world of American animation has shifted away from the staple of Disney movies and Saturday morning cartoons into a diverse array of outlets that appeal to different audiences."

As I talked about in my last blog post, the paradigm shift that has happened in animation is one that overall seems to have led to it being taken more seriously. When I started out on research for this project, I intended to focus on TV shows; however, I found the changes that happened in movies to be interesting as well as better sourced. So, I will be writing and talking about how Western animation as a whole has changed since the nostalgic days of our parents' childhoods: the increased appreciation of animation as an art form, the rise of "adult" animation, the fall of the Saturday morning block, the change from stereotypical to fleshed-out diversity in characters, and the effects of international styles on each other.

Or at least I hope to write and talk about all of that. Sources have been surprisingly difficult to find. But I'm doing my best with what I've found. There's some pretty interesting stuff out there, although much of it isn't professional or well-sourced itself.



Animated Films. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.filmsite.org/animatedfilms.html This is essentially a chronology of major events in animated filmmaking. While it covers a great span of time beginning in the 1800s, much of its focus is given to events that happened in the time period of my focus.

Evans, B. (2013, February 26). Animated TV in the 2000s: DVD Resurrection, Adult Swim, and the MacFarlane Empire. Retrieved from http://splitsider.com/2013/02/animated-tv-in-the-2000s-dvd-resurrection-adult-swim-and-the-macfarlane-empire/ This is actually the second of two articles written about the changes in the animation industry during the 1990s and 2000s, primarily focusing on adult animation, which hardly existed before then.

Sullivan, G. (2014, September 30). Saturday morning cartoons are no more. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/09/30/saturday-morning-cartoons-are-no-more/ This is a news article from when the very last Saturday morning cartoon block in existence ended. It's a clear marker of the shift that has happened, and contains some useful information on the changes that have taken place.

We used to not think about paradigm shifts so much, but now we do, is that an example

One paradigm shift brought up in class that I found very interesting was how the treatment of mental illness has changed through history, especially through the 20th century into today. It was near the end of the 1800s that asylums were beginning to fall out of favor, as the awful conditions in them were revealed to the public. Since then, new treatments have been developed for patients, and the designations of what constitutes various mental illnesses have changed as well. Overall, the shift appears to have been one away from viewing people with mental illnesses as people to be kept separate from "normal" society to one where people of all mental states deserve treatment and an equal chance in society (although it seems that every time I get to thinking that this change is close to complete, a reminder of the work that still needs to be done gets slammed directly into my face). This change has been precipitated by both a shift in the mindsets of people overall and the increasing presence and power of people with mental illness.

Another major paradigm shift I have noticed is one that is probably a lot simpler and less serious. We've all heard stories about the Saturday morning cartoons that were apparently ubiquitous in the 1960s. These were generally simplistic affairs full of slapstick violence and visual gags. Nowadays, such cartoons are the exception; their place in animation is taken by "adult" animation, young educational shows, and the increasingly popular genre of cute shows about small children who inadvertently cause the apocalypse. Clearly, something has changed about the way that animation is treated by both producers and viewers, and the main result of this seems to be that animation, particularly in television, is more respected now. As for what caused this change, I would guess that it was because of the improvements in technology, especially the development of CGI, along with several important experiments in animation that served as examples of what the medium is capable of.