The Great Debaters
Casey Green 1 09/13/11 SPC 100 Section 14 The Great Debaters This film focuses on being a confident and decisive person in life, through passionate and informed topics. Public speaking is the process of speaking to a group of people in a structured, deliberate manner intended to inform, influence, or entertain the listeners.? After watching this film it does strike a cord of wanting to be able to reach out to others and share my own opinions in a strong, confident manner. To inspire others on something I may be passionate about in life, to share a different aspect of life that others have not lived.
I can’t say exactly how much this film has impacted my views on public speaking although the film itself does evoke a response. In relation to our course goals and objectives, the film also emphasizes the improvement of individual speaking skills. Our course goals involve communicating effectively, using speech as a way of achieving personal/ professional goals and that public speaking can be used for social change. In The Great Debaters it speaks of social change in the actors’ life and being part of the voices in that transformation.
Similarly to public speaking, it is essential to articulate the ways in which ethical free speech is a tool for change.? Public speaking is used to inform and educate people on debatable subjects with the intention of giving them a different aspect to consider. Denzel Washington in this film stresses that “Education is the way out of ignorance and darkness into the light. ” Comparable to the film, public speaking hopes to increase awareness of oneself as an effective communicator and be confident in sharing the ideas with others.
Critical thinking, listening skills and being able to research and organize ideas are all effective tools with public speaking. The Great Debaters use these skills throughout the movie. 2 My individual goals would be to feel prepared when giving a speech, since I tend to be a procrastinator, and in this forum it would be easily noticed. Feeling confident about the spoken subject even if its something I am not completely confident in. I hope to control my anxiety while speaking in front of a group, since there might be a situation in my field that requires me to inform others of daily logs or protocols.
It would be fulfilling to get others passionate about a subject that I favor and means a lot to me, as well as presentations are an expected process in future classes and need to be mastered. I think most people can identify with this movie, the fear of speaking out to others to convince them of your point. The fear of trying to prove a point to others that may have more knowledge on the subject or be able to refute it better. In reference to the movie it was about defending a personal honor, having the right to speak out and be equal with others. Debating requires excellent mastery of vocabulary, logic, and nerves.
In a debate, you need to be poised and confident in order to get your point across effectively. Just like a regular speech. There are many speeches that have lifted hearts in dark times, gave hope in despair, inspired brave feats, gave courage to the weary, honored the dead, and changed the course of history. Without inspiring, passionate public speeches many people may not have had the fortitude to press on. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, Martin Luther King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action.
Always a strong worker for civil rights for members of his race, King was, by this time, a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading organization of its kind in the nation. On December 21, 1956, after the Supreme Court of the United States had declared unconstitutional the laws requiring segregation on buses, Negroes and whites rode the buses as equals. King also led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. He planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D. C. , of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, “l Have a Dream”, and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.? “I have a dream today. ” “This will be the day, this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my father’s died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring! ? As President, Abraham Lincoln built the Republican Party into a strong national organization. Further, he rallied most of the northern Democrats to the Union cause. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy. Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger issue. This he stated most movingly in dedicating the military cemetery at Gettysburg: 272 words. 3 minutes long. Yet, the Gettysburg Address is unarguably one of the greatest pieces of rhetoric in American history.
The men, of both North and South, lying in the graves at Gettysburg had made an atoning sacrifice for this great evil. And the Constitution would be reborn. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. ” “-we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. 4 When you think or read something of these types of magnitude it reveals that public speaking can be handy, it can change things, it can inspire. In actuality, it does matter. References Dictionary. Com http://dictionary. reference. com/ Syllabus Martin Luther King – Biography”. Nobelprize. org. 13 Sep 2011 http://www. nobelprize. org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/king-bio. html McKay, Brett, and Kate . “The 35 Greatest Speeches in History. ” The Art of Manliness. August 1, 2008 http://artofmanliness. com/2008/08/01/the-35-greatest-speeches-in-history/4/
