Speech Portfolio Reflection

Portfolio response and reflection

In general terms, the speech analysis went decently well, it wasn't too hard and gave me only minor issues but for the majority of it, it was ok, and somewhat enjoyable even. Working in the classroom went well and it helped me to understand some of the more foreign concepts better.

My favorite speech we did was FDR’s Day of Infamy speech, this was one of the first speeches we did, but I also feel it was one of the most impactful speeches we did, and even 83 years later this speech still holds value and feels effective, it's an icon speech from the WWII era and it deserves to be such, my all-time favorite quote from this speech was “With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us god.” (Roosevelt, pg 3 [15]). This quote felt like it had so much purpose and felt like it could genuinely motivate someone to go engage in a war for their country, the tone used seemed serious but also determined and less of a “we can” or a “we will” and more of a promise that FDR was giving to the people.

My least favorite speech by far was Touchscreen, by Marshall Davus Jones, the idea of the speech was good, however, I don't like the execution of it, it felt almost too repetitive, unlike other speeches where repetition is used sparingly and well, it felt as if in this speech more than half of the speech was him repeating the exact words, or repeating the same thing phrased differently. A quote that shows the strong use of repetition is “ like e-pills so we E-trade, email, like e-commerce”(Jones pg 3). 

The easiest literary terms for me to find were things like structured breaks, parallel structures, and repetition, while the hardest were things like juxtaposition and syntax. I feel that I still don't fully grasp the idea of things like juxtaposition, syntax, and Allusion, however Allusion I have a better idea of I find it difficult to read one thing while trying to pick out references to other things I've read, seen, or heard in the past. 

2 terms I feel I did not know at the beginning and I now am familiar with are, metaphors, and sentence structures, some quotes from speeches we have read that I was able to pick up on and annotate myself are “What if Michael Jordan quit? Well, he did quit, but he retired, yeah that's it he retired”( Kid Pres, pg 1) this is a quote I picked up for sentence structure and I found to work well when writing the prompts in the summative; and this quote “ A team you would give your right arm to beat”(Gehrig) that I took down for metaphor, as time went on annotating these speeches I started picking up and rotating more and more metaphor, and this quote was one of them that helped and gave me a good image of what to look for. 

Analyzing speeches has helped me become more observant and weary of small details in writing and other things, i think that this may have been able to help make me notice more things around me, and I think we were made to do it in class because it not only showed we were paying attention, but it also took effort, we couldn't just google everything we had to look for it ourselves and use our own ideas.

Doing the speeches was overall pretty good it was not very hard but it was not very easy to do either because when we first started doing the speeches I did not know very much about the literary terms and how to find them but now some of it comes pretty easy to find them like I can find metaphors and when they take breaks pretty easily. Some of the hard things to find were some of the storytelling things some of them were pretty hard to find. 

    The speech I liked the most was Day of Infamy by Franklin D Roosevelt “ No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through absolute victory” I chose this quote because it helps me understand like how determined he was to get revenge on japan. Another good quote from this speech that I like is “ There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger” I choose this quote too because it shows that he is kinda of nervous and you can hear his tone change here from the rest of the speech. 

     One of the speeches that I did not like was Touchscreen by Marshall Davis Jones. I did not like this speech because the way it was formatted made it hard for me to read and understand it also the way he talked and his tone changed. “ Garden of Eden to the branches of Macintosh. “ When our technology is advanced enough to make us human again” 

          One speech that helped me understand literary terms is The Day of Infamy for tone “ The United States was at peace with that nation and solicitation.” Another term from this speech that helped me was “ No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through absolute victory” for foreshadowing. 

                 Doing this will help me in the future because I want to go into a career that involves law and when you are doing this you have to look at the small details and think about stuff doing all the summarizing is gonna help me because I might have to summarize what happened on a scene or something.

we had similar reflections, we both liked FDR speech and disliked the touchscreen speech 

Overall this process went pretty well for me, I liked most of the speeches as they were pretty easy to understand and annotate but some of the speeches were easier than others. My favorite speech to read and annotate was the speech named “Touchscreen” by Marshall Davis Jones and it is my favorite because of the tone he uses in it, and his choice of verbiage. One quote from this speech that I liked was “I face Facebook more than books face me”. Another quote from this speech that I like is “We used to sprint to pick and store blackberries, Now we run to the Sprint Store to pick Blackberries”. I think working on this class went pretty well and I think to make this process better for me and everyone if we had more time to work on it in class and more time to work one on one with you for help.  

I think that the literary terms that were the easiest are the simile and metaphor because we have already learned this in the past. The ones that are the most difficult are syntax and allusion because it's a new concept that we had to learn, and we are still trying to learn what they mean. One of the main speeches that helped me learn these literary terms are the Steve Jobs speech and the MLK speech because of how long and complex they are.  One quote from the Steve Jobs Speech that helped me understand literary terms is “It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic.” Another quote from the Steve Jobs speech that helped me understand literary terms was “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.” One literary term that I felt like I didnt know at the beginning that I feel confident knowing now is alliteration. Some literary terms that I feel like I still need to work on are the syntax and allusion. 

Analzying these speeches helped me relate things to my future and what I need to know for my future because in some of the speeches there were inspirational quotes convincing me that you have to find your own path, and to follow your heart.

Portfolio reflection 

This process went pretty well for me, I found it on the easy side to annotating and reading the speeches. The speeches I liked were “Touchscreen”  by Marshall Davis Jones, a quote that I liked from this speech was “From the Garden of Eden to the branches of Macintosh apple picking has always come with a great cost.” The other speech I liked was Martin Luther King's, “I Have a Dream Speech” and a quote that I liked from this speech was “ but we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vault of opportunity of this nation, so we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.” 

I liked working on things primarily in class because I focus better when I am not at home. I have less distraction and I get more work done. I feel like what would have made it better if we spent more time on other literary terms we didn't really go over. I think that the easiest  literary terms to find were Allusion, Repetition, metaphor and juxtaposition. I personally didn't have a hard time finding any of the literary terms. I didn't know what Juxtaposition or allusion was, a quote that helped me understand allusion was “I face facebook more than books face me” from Touchscreen by Marshall Davis Jones this quote helped me understand because it is making a connection to something we all know and comparing it to something else. A quote that helped me understand the juxtaposition was “America has given the people a bad check, a check that has come back marked “insufficient funds." This quote helped me understand the juxtaposition because they are comparing things that have nothing to do with each other and making them have to do with each other. Literary terms I still do not know are syntax and alliteration. 

  These different speeches told me to follow my heart and do what makes me happy so that way I can get to my goal of being successful in the future.

a difference in our reflections was, i disliked touchscreen, while she liked it 

STYX , Rb 

Chick

EnglishIII

Oct, 21, 2024

;The process of annotating and reading peaches is absolutely mind numbing. I find no joy in it. However out of all the speeches i have annotated so far; when asked which ones were less of a drawl i would say the  steve jobs speech I found quite inspiring. Especially  in Steve Jobs' speech when he says in paragraph(23) . “Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.’-...’don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.” and again when at the end of paragraph (18) he states. “You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” Working on this speech wasn't nearly as boring because I myself can understand what it's like to want to drop out of school and go your own way. Though it wasn't that hard to annotate any of the other speeches. It was just easier to do because this one was so entertaining.  

Out of all the literary terms it was quite easy to see things like repetition, and pacing, more so than any of the terms under storytelling categories or descriptive imagery except for in the MLK speech where imagery and storytelling was at the forefront, as well as many emphasis aspects. For example in  paragraph (10). “The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”

This single sentence is full of imagery, and presents shift, and tone. Throughout the speech he takes pauses before emphasizing what was just said or addressing new points in his speech.  These natural breaks can be heard in his speech and are represented on paper as breaks between paragraphs and hyphens, or in some versions an ellipsis.  

I think its good that we have learned to go over and annotate these speeches. It is a good way for us to get into the practice of active reading so that we can better remember what has been read, and not just skim over information too fast without committing it to memory. 

I do think that a lot of our future is tied to the past and reading this literature and other forms of historical record can help guide us to a better future.

I liked the touchscreen speech personally i don't really know why but it was just the one i liked the most my favorite part of the speech was “we used to sprint to pick and store blackberries, now  we run to the sprint store to pick blackberries” (Jones 2) the one i didnt like was the Lou Gehrig one it was short and it was fine but not my favorite “look at these grand men which of you wouldnt consider it the highlight of his career” (Gehrig) personally the message of his speech was not relatable and just bland and didnt make alot of sense to me. Working in class was pretty easy, i dont really think anything could have made it better but maybe if their was music or something besides silence then it would have been nicer. The easiest literary terms to find for me was syntax and the hardest to find was conflict or juxtaposition. The one literaray term that i didnt know that i can now easily find is syntax and parallel structure a good example of syntax that i found on my own is “your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other peoples thinking”(job’s 4). A good example of parallel structure was “like e-pills so we E-Trade email e-motion like e-commerce”(Jones 3) . I know most of the literary terms except for alliteration, assonance, and consonance. Knowing how to analyze speeches helps me pass my english and not be held back a year and graduate high school

The process of reading and annotating all of these speeches was very tedious but i didn’t really mind doing it because I had to and also because I learned a lot about the people that wrote the speeches. Doing the speeches in class was fine for me because I had all of the resources available and sometimes we would also listen or watch the speech as we read, but a disadvantage from doing it in class was that I missed a day for some reason when it got explained so I was put in it blindsided but I eventually caught on.

My favorite speech that we did was “A Pep Talk From Kid President to You” by Kid President. This speech was my favorite because it was really funny and also because we used to watch his videos in class a long time ago and it reminded me of then. Here’s a quote from his speech, “Two roads diverged in the woods… and I took the road less traveled… AND IT HURT MAN! Really bad” (President, 1). That is just one thing among all of the other funny things that he says in this speech. 

A speech that I didn’t like so much was “Day of Infamy” by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Even though I understand that this speech was so important, I didn’t really enjoy reading it because it was kind of boring. A quote that shows this is, “During the intervening time, the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United states with false statements,” (Roosevelt, 1). This quote is very informative but he uses some big words that could confuse people, not me, but this makes it kind of boring to read.

The easiest Literary terms to find were repetition and narrative. Those were easy for me to find because when reading it’s pretty obvious to find when people are repeating stuff, and it’s pretty obvious to tell when they are narrating because it’s in first person. Some literary terms that were harder to find were suspense and structured breaks but I don’t know if they are that hard to find, or if I”m just bad at it, or if they just didn’t show up that much. A literary term that I know now is juxtaposition and I had never heard it before. A speech that helped me understand juxtaposition was “Touchscreen” by Mashall Davis Jones, A quote from this is, “We used to sprint to pick and store blackberries, Now we run to the Sprint Store to pick Blackberries,” (Jones, 2). And another example is “I, face Facebook, more that books face me,” (Jones, 1). These quotes show juxtaposition because they both have slightly different sentences to bring out their differences. I feel like I know all of the literary terms but some are still confusing like assonance and consonance.

Analyzing speeches might not relate to anything that I’m going to do but I think it helps with problem solving and making better inferences faster, but I don’t really know what I want to do yet so I’m sure it will help me out at some point in my life.

I think this process overall was okay, I didn’t mind it and I didn’t hate it. It was fairly easy but I did struggle with some things. 

I liked the MLK JR speech because the speech was pretty straight forward and was easy to do. I’m gonna be honest, I like the easy stuff. “Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snow capped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.” (MLKJR, pg 6). A speech I didn’t like was the Reshma Saujani one because I think it was just the way the paper was set up to be honest, the format was too weird and everything was squished together and tiny. I I do however like the speech itself, it really tells you to be yourself and to not change for anyone. “They changed their names so I wouldn’t have to.” (Saujani, paragraph 80).

I think working on them in class was easier than working on it at home, only because I can ask more questions instead of playing “email-tag” back and forth. 

Tone, Comparison, Repetition,  and Narrative were definitely the easiest to find because they were simple. Narrative was just looking for someone to say “I” and then continue speaking to the audience, and Tone was just the attitude the speaker had towards something, and repetition was something being repeated. The difficult ones were probably juxtaposition and syntax because there's a lot of things that are similar to those terms but not exactly the same

I didn’t know what syntax was but the more I see examples of it, the more I understand it. I also caught onto hyperbole because I used to think it was pretty much the same thing as a metaphor.  “I’m on your team, be on my team.” (Kid President, line 5). “You have a heartbeat! That means it's time to do somethin!” (Kid president, line 7). That's a metaphor.

 I don’t know juxtaposition off the top of my head and I am still confused about syntax for things that could be similar. 

Analyzing speeches helps because it teaches you how to pay attention to the English language and how to better understand it. It can help determine how someone feels about a subject. This can help me in my future to read documents and understand what the speaker is trying to get across and how they truly feel about the subject. I believe it's also just good to know these things in life overall. 

Portfolio Reflection

At first I found it a little difficult, because it was my first time reading and analyzing speeches in English. But during the time we’ve been working on this, I’ve realized that it’s actually very similar to what I used to do in Spain. So it didn’t take me too long to get into it and now I think I’ve improved a lot in this area.

I really liked Steve Jobs' speech, because he speaks in a way that seems to me very clear and easier to understand than other speeches. Also, he talks about different topics, giving the same importance to all of them and he gives good advice, for example: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right” (Jobs 17, 2).

On the other hand I didn’t like the Marshall David Jones’ very much, because I didn’t know some of the expressions he uses, so it was more difficult to understand it, for example: “It used to be hard to connect when friends formed cliques but it's even more difficult to connect now that clicks form” (Davis Jones 9) . Although I really liked the message it conveys.

I find it really easy to find some literary terms like Parallel Structure or Structured Break. However, I am usually not able to find other terms like Understatement or Hyperbole. I already knew all of these literary terms, because I used to read speeches and other different texts, but it was my first time annotating in English. So this has helped me a lot to understand the message of the speeches and the intention of the author, for example: “Sure, I’m lucky” (Gehrig 2, 4) or “So I bravely quit my job. I bravely ran for Congress” (Saujani 10).

I think this is very important for understanding the meaning of the words and the true message that someone wants to transmit, because sometimes we read something and we don’t think about what the author was thinking when he wrote the text and what he was trying to tell us. Most of these speeches talk about goals in life and pursuit of dreams. And I think nowadays it’s essential to make young people believe they can achieve their goals in life, because they are going to build our future world. So, even if your dream is not to become a professional singer or author, I think that analyzing speeches will always help you, because reading is an essential activity in our lives and it will always be present.

I also find it really easy too find literary terms such as structured break.