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‘The job is resistance’: Patricia Evangelista at Nobel torchlight procession

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RESISTANCE. Patricia Evangelista at the Nobel torchlight ceremony.

Hannah Reyes Morales

Below is the full text of Patricia Evangelista’s speech during the torchlight walk program for Nobel Peace laureates Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov on Friday, December 10, in Oslo. Evangelista, Rappler’s investigative journalist who produced its compelling stories on the brutal drug war of the Duterte government, was one of the four speakers during the ceremony. The other speakers were Dr. Nadezda Azhgikhina, a Moscow-based journalist and writer, director of PEN Moscow; Anette Trettebergstuen, Norwegian Minister of Culture and Equality; and Barbara Trionfi, executive director at the International Press Institute . 

My name is Patricia Evangelista, and for more than a decade, I worked for a small, independent news agency named Rappler. I’m a trauma reporter. It means that I report about terrible things that happened because those things shouldn’t have happened and shouldn’t happen again. And then, five years ago, the man who would become the president of the Philippines promised the deaths of his own people. The terrible became ordinary, to thundering applause. Now I’m going to tell you what terror looks like. Once, I stood outside a house where five men had been killed. The families gathered outside. Please, they pleaded, tell us who the dead men are. The cops refused, shouted at one mother, shoved another daughter. And then it rained, hard and heavy. People ran and the cops laughed. See, said one police officer. He pointed to the sky. See, even God is on my side.  Once, I spoke to the families of young men who had been killed in the drug war. They called the deaths executions. One father refused to put his name on the record, but his wife told me to use hers. She said it was the one thing she could do for her dead son. Once, I sat across vigilantes who told me that the cops had ordered them to kill. I couldn’t talk to the cop they named because he refused to comment. I couldn’t talk to the families of the dead because they were in hiding. Isn’t it strange, one of the vigilantes told me, that it’s the families of the dead who have to run? I don’t live with terror every day. They do. One wake was empty of mourners because every neighbor was afraid to be seen paying respects. One teenager dropped out of school to trail her mother because she was afraid Mama would be shot next. One woman who had just buried a son stood outside a police station standing guard because another son had been arrested, and she was afraid he wouldn’t live through the night. In my country, anyone can be called a terrorist. Addicts, activists, lawyers, journalists. But terror is a complicated word. I’ll give you the other word for it, one that is less bound by politics and privilege. The word is fear. Fear is what makes you faint at a police station, in front of your sobbing son. Fear comes to a father when he kneels on a linoleum floor mopping up his son’s blood, saying sorry, I didn’t fight back. Sometimes it makes you apologize to coffins or withdraw witness statements or refuse to testify. Sometimes it stops you from asking questions. Or publishing your byline. Or sharing the story of a boy who said, please, arrest me instead.

We published these stories, and many others. We were called liars and fake news. Our license was put in jeopardy. Many advertisers disappeared. My bosses were charged, arrested, and convicted. Our reporters were banned from the palace. They were trolled and threatened, and because we are women, the threats included rape.

Maria Ressa said keep going. Tell the stories. At great personal cost, she did not run, she did not hide, she did not compromise, and because she did not, those of us on the field could tell the truth and know she had our backs. 

Rappler is not the only news agency in the Philippines exposing corruption and the brutalities of the drug war. Neither are they the only journalists working under threat. Journalism is a tradition, and the line that Rappler holds is one that was drawn decades ago by men and women who stood at the barricades and said this far, no further. When brutalities are commonplace, the job of everyday journalism is resistance.

Today, after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Maria Ressa and Dimitry Muratov, we celebrate a world that understands that no democracy can exist with a citizenry terrified into silence. Tomorrow, we will go home to our desks, to the field, to newsrooms all over the world, with the awareness that even if we’re afraid, we don’t tell our stories alone. Thank you. – Rappler.com

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Patricia Evangelista tells stories as a record and ‘some sort of reckoning’

• In conversation with the writer on her harrowing new book, the work of trauma journalism, and the question of whether some people need killing

Before anything, Patricia Evangelista is a storyteller. 

The launch of her new book, “Some People Need Killing,” at the Columbia University School of Journalism begins with Evangelista onstage: high ponytail, red lipstick, gray three-piece suit, black boots. She delivers a monologue adapted from the book’s first chapter, which recounts the story of Love-Love, an eleven-year-old girl, who watched gunmen kill both of her parents in the early months of former President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war. Evangelista recounts the killing in sharp detail. In the audience apart from the occasional low gasp, you can hear a pin drop. Few things make the point quite as well as a story does.

The monologue is an introduction of herself, too. Evangelista was born in 1985, right before the EDSA Revolution. Her job as a trauma journalist and investigative reporter, she says, “is to go to the places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don’t wait very long.”

For three years, Evangelista covered Dutere’s drug war, a spate of extrajudicial killings that began the moment the president took office and whose death toll remains contested. She was on the night shift with a group of journalists, making their way to each of these crime scenes and reckoning with telling these stories. The book, published by Random House, weaves its narrative around her encounters with victims’ families, a slew of policemen, and a few hired/vigilante killers, one of whom supplied the title. In an interview with Evangelista, he said, “I’m really not a bad guy. I’m not all bad. Some people need killing.” 

And if nothing else, [trauma journalism]’s the act of trying. We’re going to keep failing.

In conversation with Maria Ressa, Evangelista’s former boss at Rappler, where her stories ran, she explains that her investigative work is borne of a love for stories. “Every story is a love story—a mother to a child, a husband to a wife,” she says. “Every story is a whole person. And, if nothing else, in the first place, I’m interested. In the second place, I would like to honor the person whose body is on the ground, whose family is waiting. So I dive because I think what happened deserves more than one sentence on a spot report.”

I meet Evangelista a few days after outside a late-night pizza spot in Brooklyn. Amidst the occasional passing siren, we talk at length about the book and its stories. 

‘I needed to ask more questions’

The book began as a summation of those years of nightly reportage, but it grew to be more complex than that. “I was reporting on the deaths and I was doing it story by story, crime scene by crime scene,” she says. “It occurred to me, sometime after those first two, almost three years that I needed to ask more questions. Not so much about how people died or who was it that died. I needed to know why. I wanted to know why. That’s what the book is: It’s why we kill.” 

American novelist and screenwriter George R.R. Martin describes two types of writers: architects and gardeners. Evangelista identifies as an architect. “Some People Need Killing” is a testament to that. The book, answering the question of why we kill, isn’t shaped as a straight retelling of her reportage. It’s this well-crafted passage through the interlocking narratives of the war, divided into three parts—Memory, Carnage, and Requiem—that deal respectively with Duterte’s rise, the war that began after his election, and its aftermath. 

“Memory” offers a sweep through the decades of Filipino history leading up to Duterte. “His election and the carnage that came after that was not an overnight event. It came from something else. So, I wanted to establish that: that the carnage was not sudden but borne of years of failed expectations as well,” Evangelista says. 

“I understood early on that any book published globally about the Philippines would inevitably have to be an explainer about the Philippines… I would hope, also, that in the future, when Filipinos read it from a different generation, a different context—if the book still exists in 20 or 30 years—then there would be nuances of where we come from and what we were writing for.”

Parts of the book, too, contend with questions of language itself. Evangelista fixates on language (all writers do), but semantics takes on a different tone in the work of reporting on murder. She says, “A lot of what’s in the book are questions I asked myself on the streets or even at my desk. ‘Why is there no synonym for “bleed?”’ ‘How come I couldn’t find another word for “corpse?”’ ‘Why was it that on paper it was so difficult to write down what Rodrigo Duterte said, but hearing it, it seemed perfectly natural and almost inevitable?’”

She also delves into the origin of the word “salvage”—a contronym, she says—as used in the Philippine context; the usage of “disappear” as a transitive verb (for example: “The military disappeared the women”); the verbs of violence (“trigger to finger,” “knife to gut”); how Duterte said the word “kill” at least 1,254 times in the first six months of his presidency. This, too, is a question of rhetoric: How does language set violence into motion? 

Accounting for oneself

The book is subtitled “A Memoir of Murder in My Country . ” In that sense, one of the narratives integrated into Evangelista’s blueprint is her own. Chapter 3: “Mascot for Hope” dips into sections of autobiography, where Evangelista narrates her childhood in the wake of the EDSA Revolution, her beginnings in debate and public speaking as an undergrad at the University of the Philippines and how that led her to journalism and what became her day-to-day work. These root us in a personal story entwined in a national history.

It took a long time to not only find my own voice but to also be willing to use it.

Evangelista did not intend for the book to be a first-person account. “I am not comfortable with being in front of the camera and using my own voice as an individual, but Random House felt that for a book like this, with the grimness and carnage involved, it would be best to have someone to guide people through it and it was going to have to be me. I took a very long time wrestling with that,” she says. 

“It took a long time to not only find my own voice but to also be willing to use it. I would like to add, though, that while the first person was not strictly voluntary, as the process went on, I felt I had to account for myself as well. I’m glad for how it turned out. I’m also glad I had to do it because I never would have done it if it wasn’t required of me.”

Whether it’s David Remnick of The New Yorker or an earnest journalism student at the question and answer at Columbia, what many people ask Evangelista is how she survives reporting on trauma, going out night after night to find bodies, and living with the stories of the dead for far longer as she writes. 

“For the reporter, there’s the awareness that you’re not the camera,” she says. “You’re going to have to absorb this, and the manner I report means I absorb it more deeply than most because I have to get the details and I have to see it as people have either seen it or imagined it. The way I write means I also have to live through it repeatedly when I write the story, tell the story, or just run the crime scene through in my head.” 

There is no direct answer to how, but she does survive it. “It is important to have a tribe of people who understand what you do. Self-care is also important… Maybe having a life separate from the job is important. Maybe just being healthy is important,” she profers. “There are many ways to cope, but for me, it’s not one way.”

The book manages as well to show the care she employs as a trauma journalist. Evangelista is clear on her methodology, one she developed in the hopes of telling the story without endangering or retraumatizing the people who must tell the stories “that require some sort of record and some sort of reckoning.”

She says, “Informed trauma journalism means you understand where people are coming from, that you don’t force them into answers that they don’t want to tell you, that you respect consent absolutely, that not only do you ask for consent but you also tell them what that consent means. You also are aware that your presence in the aftermath can re-traumatize other people. It’s all of those elements. And if nothing else, it’s the act of trying. We’re going to keep failing.”

To one of Ressa’s questions at the launch, Evangelista responds that she doesn’t believe journalism will save the world, that there is no “magical phalanx of humanity standing in between the addicts and the gun.” The value of the story, she believes, is perhaps the record itself, and the hope that it will be part of some reckoning. “My expectation is to keep a record. A good one, I hope. A compelling one, I hope. I hope to honor the people, who trusted me with their stories, who took the risks that are far beyond the risks I ever took.”

I ask what’s next for her and all she can think of, after three years of covering a drug war and four years of writing a book, is the next story. 

“I thought that when the book was completed, I would know what to do next. I don’t,” she says. “What I do know is there are many stories and there’s always a next storm, and this story isn’t over. I know I’m going back on the field. I’m going home.”

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Patricia Evangelista

Patricia Evangelista is a trauma journalist and former investigative reporter for the Philippine news company Rappler. Her reporting on armed conflict and the aftermath of Super Typhoon Haiyan was awarded the Kate Webb Prize for exceptional journalism in dangerous conditions. She was a Headlands Artist in Residence, a recipient of the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, and a fellow of the Logan Nonfiction Program, the Marshall McLuhan Fellowship, the De La Salle University Democracy Discourse Series, the New America Fellows Program, Civitella Ranieri, and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. Her work investigating President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war has earned a number of local and international accolades. She lives in Manila.

Philippines

Literary Journalism

Some People Need Killing

Internationally renowned trauma journalist Patricia Evangelista’s debut book, SOME PEOPLE NEED KILLING: A Memoir of Murder in My Country (Random House), is a powerful, on-the-ground account of a nation careening into a violent autocracy told through the harrowing stories of the Philippines’ state-sanctioned killings of its citizens. Evangelista’s work is a profound act of witness and tour de force of literary journalism.

Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte.

Some People Need Killing is Evangelista’s meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines’ drug war and Duterte’s assault on the country’s struggling democracy. For six years, Evangelista had the distinctive beat of chronicling the killings carried out by police and vigilantes in the name of Duterte’s war on drugs – a war that has led to the slaughter of thousands – immersing herself in the world of killers and survivors and capturing the atmosphere of fear created when an elected president decides that some lives are worth less than others.

Reviews for Some People Need Killing

“Patricia Evangelista exposes the evil in her country with perfect clarity fueled by profound rage, her voice at one utterly beautiful and terrifyingly vulnerable. In short, clear sentences packed with faithfully recorded details, she reveals the nature of unbridled cruelty with a relentless insightfulness that I have not encountered since the work of Hannah Arendt. This is an account of a dark chapter in the Philippines, an examination of how murder was conflated with salvation in a violent society. Ultimately, however, it transcends its ostensible subject and becomes a meditation on the disabling pathos of self-delusion, a study of manipulation and corruption as they occur in conflict after conflict across the world. Few of history’s grimmest chapters have had the fortune to be narrated by such a withering, ironic, witty, devastatingly brilliant observer. You may think you are inured to shock, but this book is an exploding bomb that will damage you anew, making you wiser as it does so.”

– Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of Far and Away

“In this haunting work of memoir and reportage, Patricia Evangelista both describes the origins of autocratic rule in the Philippines and explains its universal significance. The cynicism of voters; the opportunism of Filipino politicians; the appeal of brutality and violence to both groups; all of this will be familiar to readers, wherever they are from.”

–Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of  Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“Tragic, elegant, vital. She risked her life to tell this story.”

–Tara Westover, New York Times bestselling author of Educated

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Module 6: Organizing and Outlining Your Speech

Methods of speech delivery, learning objectives.

Identify the four types of speech delivery methods and when to use them.

There are four basic methods of speech delivery: manuscript, memorized, impromptu, and extemporaneous. We’ll look at each method and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each.

A manuscript page from President George W. Bush’s address to the nation on the day of the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

A manuscript speech is when the speaker writes down every word they will speak during the speech. When they deliver the speech, they have each word planned and in front of them on the page, much like a newscaster who reads from a teleprompter.

The advantage of using a manuscript is that the speaker has access to every word they’ve prepared in advance. There is no guesswork or memorization needed. This method comforts some speakers’ nerves as they don’t have to worry about that moment where they might freeze and forget what they’ve planned to say. They also are able to make exact quotes from their source material.

When the exact wording of an idea is crucial, speakers often read from a manuscript, for instance in communicating public statements from a company.

However, the disadvantage with a manuscript is that the speakers have MANY words in front of them on the page. This prohibits one of the most important aspects of delivery, eye contact. When many words are on the page, the speakers will find themselves looking down at those words more frequently because they will need the help. If they do look up at the audience, they often cannot find their place when the eye returns to the page. Also, when nerves come into play, speakers with manuscripts often default to reading from the page and forget that they are not making eye contact or engaging their audience. Therefore, manuscript is a very difficult delivery method and not ideal.  Above all, the speakers should remember to rehearse with the script so that they practice looking up often.

Public Speaking in History

The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, owed in large part to a momentary error made by an East German government spokesperson. At a live press conference, Günter Schabowski tried to explain new rules relaxing East Germany’s severe travel restrictions. A reporter asked, “when do these new rules go into effect?” Visibly flustered, Schabowski said, “As far as I know, it takes effect immediately, without delay.” In fact, the new visa application procedure was supposed to begin the following day, and with a lot of bureaucracy and red tape. Instead, thousands of East Berliners arrived within minutes at the border crossings, demanding to pass through immediately. The rest is history.

The outcome of this particular public-relations blunder was welcomed by the vast majority of East and West German citizens, and hastened the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe. It’s probably good, then, that Schabowski ran this particular press conference extemporaneously, rather than reading from a manuscript.

You can view the transcript for “The mistake that toppled the Berlin Wall” here (opens in new window) .

A memorized speech is also fully prepared in advance and one in which the speaker does not use any notes. In the case of an occasion speech like a quick toast, a brief dedication, or a short eulogy, word-for-word memorization might make sense. Usually, though, it doesn’t involve committing each and every word to memory, Memorizing a speech isn’t like memorizing a poem where you need to remember every word exactly as written. Don’t memorize a manuscript! Work with your outline instead. Practice with the outline until you can recall the content and order of your main points without effort. Then it’s just a matter of practicing until you’re able to elaborate on your key points in a natural and seamless manner. Ideally, a memorized speech will sound like an off-the-cuff statement by someone who is a really eloquent speaker and an exceptionally organized thinker!

The advantage of a memorized speech is that the speaker can fully face their audience and make lots of eye contact. The problem with a memorized speech is that speakers may get nervous and forget the parts they’ve memorized. Without any notes to lean on, the speaker may hesitate and leave lots of dead air in the room while trying to recall what was planned. Sometimes, the speaker can’t remember or find his or her place in the speech and are forced to go get the notes or go back to the PowerPoint in some capacity to try to trigger his or her memory. This can be an embarrassing and uncomfortable moment for the speaker and the audience, and is a moment which could be easily avoided by using a different speaking method.

How to: memorize a speech

There are lots of tips out there about how to memorize speeches. Here’s one that loosely follows an ancient memorization strategy called the method of loci or “memory palace,” which uses visualizations of familiar spatial environments in order to enhance the recall of information.

You can view the transcript for “How to Memorize a Speech” here (opens in new window) .

An impromptu speech is one for which there is little to no preparation. There is often not a warning even that the person may be asked to speak. For example, your speech teacher may ask you to deliver a speech on your worst pet peeve. You may or may not be given a few minutes to organize your thoughts. What should you do? DO NOT PANIC. Even under pressure, you can create a basic speech that follows the formula of an introduction, body, and conclusion. If you have a few minutes, jot down some notes that fit into each part of the speech. (In fact, the phrase “speaking off the cuff,” which means speaking without preparation, probably refers to the idea that one would jot a few notes on one’s shirt cuff before speaking impromptu.) [1] ) An introduction should include an attention getter, introduction of the topic, speaker credibility, and forecasting of main points. The body should have two or three main points. The conclusion should have a summary, call to action, and final thought. If you can organize your thoughts into those three parts, you will sound like a polished speaker. Even if you only hit two of them, it will still help you to think about the speech in those parts. For example, if a speech is being given on a pet peeve of chewed gum being left under desks in classrooms, it might be organized like this.

• Introduction : Speaker chews gum loudly and then puts it under a desk (attention getter, demonstration). Speaker introduces themselves and the topic and why they’re qualified to speak on it (topic introduction and credibility). “I’m Katie Smith and I’ve been a student at this school for three years and witnessed this gum problem the entire time.”
• Body : Speaker states three main points of why we shouldn’t leave gum on desks: it’s rude, it makes custodians have to work harder, it affects the next student who gets nastiness on their seat (forecast of order). Speaker then discusses those three points
• Conclusion : Speaker summarizes those three points (summary, part 1 of conclusion), calls on the audience to pledge to never do this again (call to action), and gives a quote from Michael Jordan about respecting property (final thought).

While an impromptu speech can be challenging, the advantage is that it can also be thrilling as the speaker thinks off the cuff and says what they’re most passionate about in the moment. A speaker should not be afraid to use notes during an impromptu speech if they were given any time to organize their thoughts.

The disadvantage is that there is no time for preparation, so finding research to support claims such as quotes or facts cannot be included. The lack of preparation makes some speakers more nervous and they may struggle to engage the audience due to their nerves.

Extemporaneous

The last method of delivery we’ll look at is extemporaneous. When speaking extemporaneously, speakers prepare some notes in advance that help trigger their memory of what they planned to say. These notes are often placed on notecards. A 4”x6” notecard or 5”x7” size card works well. This size of notecards can be purchased at any office supply store. Speakers should determine what needs to go on each card by reading through their speech notes and giving themselves phrases to say out loud. These notes are not full sentences, but help the speakers, who turn them into a full sentence when spoken aloud. Note that if a quote is being used, listing that quote verbatim is fine.

The advantage of extemporaneous speaking is that the speakers are able to speak in a more conversational tone by letting the cards guide them, but not dictate every word they say. This method allows for the speakers to make more eye contact with the audience. The shorter note forms also prevent speakers from getting lost in their words. Numbering these cards also helps if one gets out of order. Also, these notes are not ones the teacher sees or collects. While you may be required to turn in your speech outline, your extemporaneous notecards are not seen by anyone but you. Therefore, you can also write yourself notes to speak up, slow down, emphasize a point, go to the next slide, etc.

The disadvantage to extemporaneous is the speakers may forget what else was planned to say or find a card to be out of order. This problem can be avoided through rehearsal and double-checking the note order before speaking.

Many speakers consider the extemporaneous method to be the ideal speaking method because it allows them to be prepared, keeps the audience engaged, and makes the speakers more natural in their delivery. In your public speaking class, most of your speeches will probably be delivered extemporaneously.

• As per the Oxford English Dictionary' s entry for "Off the Cuff." See an extensive discussion at Mark Liberman's Language Log here: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4130 ↵
• Method of loci definition. Provided by : Wikipedia. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
• The mistake that toppled the Berlin Wall. Provided by : Vox. Located at : https://youtu.be/Mn4VDwaV-oo . License : Other . License Terms : Standard YouTube License
• How to Memorize a Speech. Authored by : Memorize Academy. Located at : https://youtu.be/rvBw__VNrsc . License : Other . License Terms : Standard YouTube License
• Address to the Nation. Provided by : U.S. National Archives. Located at : https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2011/09/06/911-an-address-to-the-nation/ . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright
• Methods of Speech Delivery. Authored by : Misti Wills with Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

14.1 Four Methods of Delivery

Learning objectives.

• Differentiate among the four methods of speech delivery.
• Understand when to use each of the four methods of speech delivery.

Maryland GovPics – House of Ruth Luncheon – CC BY 2.0.

The easiest approach to speech delivery is not always the best. Substantial work goes into the careful preparation of an interesting and ethical message, so it is understandable that students may have the impulse to avoid “messing it up” by simply reading it word for word. But students who do this miss out on one of the major reasons for studying public speaking: to learn ways to “connect” with one’s audience and to increase one’s confidence in doing so. You already know how to read, and you already know how to talk. But public speaking is neither reading nor talking.

Speaking in public has more formality than talking. During a speech, you should present yourself professionally. This doesn’t mean you must wear a suit or “dress up” (unless your instructor asks you to), but it does mean making yourself presentable by being well groomed and wearing clean, appropriate clothes. It also means being prepared to use language correctly and appropriately for the audience and the topic, to make eye contact with your audience, and to look like you know your topic very well.

While speaking has more formality than talking, it has less formality than reading. Speaking allows for meaningful pauses, eye contact, small changes in word order, and vocal emphasis. Reading is a more or less exact replication of words on paper without the use of any nonverbal interpretation. Speaking, as you will realize if you think about excellent speakers you have seen and heard, provides a more animated message.

The next sections introduce four methods of delivery that can help you balance between too much and too little formality when giving a public speech.

Impromptu Speaking

Impromptu speaking is the presentation of a short message without advance preparation. Impromptu speeches often occur when someone is asked to “say a few words” or give a toast on a special occasion. You have probably done impromptu speaking many times in informal, conversational settings. Self-introductions in group settings are examples of impromptu speaking: “Hi, my name is Steve, and I’m a volunteer with the Homes for the Brave program.” Another example of impromptu speaking occurs when you answer a question such as, “What did you think of the documentary?”

The advantage of this kind of speaking is that it’s spontaneous and responsive in an animated group context. The disadvantage is that the speaker is given little or no time to contemplate the central theme of his or her message. As a result, the message may be disorganized and difficult for listeners to follow.

Here is a step-by-step guide that may be useful if you are called upon to give an impromptu speech in public.

• Take a moment to collect your thoughts and plan the main point you want to make.
• Thank the person for inviting you to speak.
• Deliver your message, making your main point as briefly as you can while still covering it adequately and at a pace your listeners can follow.
• Thank the person again for the opportunity to speak.
• Stop talking.

As you can see, impromptu speeches are generally most successful when they are brief and focus on a single point.

Extemporaneous Speaking

Extemporaneous speaking is the presentation of a carefully planned and rehearsed speech, spoken in a conversational manner using brief notes. By using notes rather than a full manuscript, the extemporaneous speaker can establish and maintain eye contact with the audience and assess how well they are understanding the speech as it progresses. The opportunity to assess is also an opportunity to restate more clearly any idea or concept that the audience seems to have trouble grasping.

For instance, suppose you are speaking about workplace safety and you use the term “sleep deprivation.” If you notice your audience’s eyes glazing over, this might not be a result of their own sleep deprivation, but rather an indication of their uncertainty about what you mean. If this happens, you can add a short explanation; for example, “sleep deprivation is sleep loss serious enough to threaten one’s cognition, hand-to-eye coordination, judgment, and emotional health.” You might also (or instead) provide a concrete example to illustrate the idea. Then you can resume your message, having clarified an important concept.

Speaking extemporaneously has some advantages. It promotes the likelihood that you, the speaker, will be perceived as knowledgeable and credible. In addition, your audience is likely to pay better attention to the message because it is engaging both verbally and nonverbally. The disadvantage of extemporaneous speaking is that it requires a great deal of preparation for both the verbal and the nonverbal components of the speech. Adequate preparation cannot be achieved the day before you’re scheduled to speak.

Because extemporaneous speaking is the style used in the great majority of public speaking situations, most of the information in this chapter is targeted to this kind of speaking.

Speaking from a Manuscript

Manuscript speaking is the word-for-word iteration of a written message. In a manuscript speech, the speaker maintains his or her attention on the printed page except when using visual aids.

The advantage to reading from a manuscript is the exact repetition of original words. As we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, in some circumstances this can be extremely important. For example, reading a statement about your organization’s legal responsibilities to customers may require that the original words be exact. In reading one word at a time, in order, the only errors would typically be mispronunciation of a word or stumbling over complex sentence structure.

However, there are costs involved in manuscript speaking. First, it’s typically an uninteresting way to present. Unless the speaker has rehearsed the reading as a complete performance animated with vocal expression and gestures (as poets do in a poetry slam and actors do in a reader’s theater), the presentation tends to be dull. Keeping one’s eyes glued to the script precludes eye contact with the audience. For this kind of “straight” manuscript speech to hold audience attention, the audience must be already interested in the message before the delivery begins.

It is worth noting that professional speakers, actors, news reporters, and politicians often read from an autocue device, such as a TelePrompTer, especially when appearing on television, where eye contact with the camera is crucial. With practice, a speaker can achieve a conversational tone and give the impression of speaking extemporaneously while using an autocue device. However, success in this medium depends on two factors: (1) the speaker is already an accomplished public speaker who has learned to use a conversational tone while delivering a prepared script, and (2) the speech is written in a style that sounds conversational.

Speaking from Memory

Memorized speaking is the rote recitation of a written message that the speaker has committed to memory. Actors, of course, recite from memory whenever they perform from a script in a stage play, television program, or movie scene. When it comes to speeches, memorization can be useful when the message needs to be exact and the speaker doesn’t want to be confined by notes.

The advantage to memorization is that it enables the speaker to maintain eye contact with the audience throughout the speech. Being free of notes means that you can move freely around the stage and use your hands to make gestures. If your speech uses visual aids, this freedom is even more of an advantage. However, there are some real and potential costs. First, unless you also plan and memorize every vocal cue (the subtle but meaningful variations in speech delivery, which can include the use of pitch, tone, volume, and pace), gesture, and facial expression, your presentation will be flat and uninteresting, and even the most fascinating topic will suffer. You might end up speaking in a monotone or a sing-song repetitive delivery pattern. You might also present your speech in a rapid “machine-gun” style that fails to emphasize the most important points. Second, if you lose your place and start trying to ad lib, the contrast in your style of delivery will alert your audience that something is wrong. More frighteningly, if you go completely blank during the presentation, it will be extremely difficult to find your place and keep going.

Key Takeaways

• There are four main kinds of speech delivery: impromptu, extemporaneous, manuscript, and memorized.
• Impromptu speaking involves delivering a message on the spur of the moment, as when someone is asked to “say a few words.”
• Extemporaneous speaking consists of delivering a speech in a conversational fashion using notes. This is the style most speeches call for.
• Manuscript speaking consists of reading a fully scripted speech. It is useful when a message needs to be delivered in precise words.
• Memorized speaking consists of reciting a scripted speech from memory. Memorization allows the speaker to be free of notes.
• Find a short newspaper story. Read it out loud to a classroom partner. Then, using only one notecard, tell the classroom partner in your own words what the story said. Listen to your partner’s observations about the differences in your delivery.
• In a group of four or five students, ask each student to give a one-minute impromptu speech answering the question, “What is the most important personal quality for academic success?”
• Watch the evening news. Observe the differences between news anchors using a TelePrompTer and interviewees who are using no notes of any kind. What differences do you observe?

Stand up, Speak out Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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A Country Where ‘Some People Need Killing’ Was State Policy

The new book by the Philippine journalist Patricia Evangelista recounts her investigation into the campaign of extrajudicial murders under former President Rodrigo Duterte.

By Jennifer Szalai

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SOME PEOPLE NEED KILLING : A Memoir of Murder in My Country , by Patricia Evangelista This was one of the Book Review’s 10 best books of 2023 .

Before reading “Some People Need Killing,” a powerful new book by the Philippine journalist Patricia Evangelista, I had assumed that the definition of “salvage” was straightforward. The word comes from salvare , Latin for “to save.” You salvage cargo from a wreckage; you salvage mementos from a fire.

But the word “salvage” has another meaning in Philippine English. This definition derives from salvaje , Spanish for “wild.” The Oxford English Dictionary calls it a “complete semantic change from the original English meaning ‘to rescue.’” It is a contronym: a word that can also mean its opposite. “To salvage” in the Philippines means “to apprehend and execute (a suspected criminal) without trial.”

Evangelista calls this a corruption of the language — one that turns out to be horrifically apropos. “Some People Need Killing” mostly covers the years between 2016 and 2022, when Rodrigo Duterte was president of the Philippines and pursued a murderous campaign of “salvagings,” or extrajudicial killings — EJKs for short. Such killings became so frequent that journalists like Evangelista, then a reporter for the independent news site Rappler, kept folders on their computers that were organized not by date but by hour of death.

The book gets its title from one of Evangelista’s sources, a Duterte-supporting vigilante called Simon. “I’m not really a bad guy,” Simon told her, explaining that he was making the slum where he lived safer for his children. “I’m not all bad. Some people need killing.” They don’t just deserve it; they require it. Responsibility for the deaths rests with the dead themselves. “The language does not allow for accountability,” Evangelista writes. “The execution of their deaths becomes a performance of duty.”

Evangelista was born in 1985, a few months before the Marcos dictatorship ended and a new era of Philippine democracy began. She was a young public-speaking champion who became a production assistant at an English-language news channel and a columnist for one of the daily papers, before switching focus to investigative journalism. It was the disappearance of two young women in 2006 that dispelled her illusions about her government. The women were community organizers. Eventually, sworn testimonies and commissions pieced together the truth. The women did not simply “disappear”; they were disappeared. They had been abducted and tortured by the military.

This was a decade before Duterte ascended to the country’s highest office. The book is mainly about him, but Evangelista wants us to know that Duterte did not come out of nowhere. Before his landslide victory in the presidential election of 2016, he was the longtime mayor of Davao City on the southern island of Mindanao. He pretended to come from humble beginnings when in fact he was a scion of the elite.

In the late 1980s, anti-communist vigilante groups were endorsed by President Corazon Aquino, whose People Power Revolution had peacefully toppled the Marcos dictatorship. As the communist presence ebbed in Davao City, counterinsurgency methods were used to target criminals and suspected drug users. When Duterte became mayor in 1988, bodies started showing up with notes reading “Davao Death Squad.” Duterte categorically denied the existence of the death squads one moment and denied it a little bit less the next. Sometimes he loudly declared that he would kill people. “If you are doing an illegal activity in my city,” Duterte announced to reporters in 2009, “you are a legitimate target of assassination.” Pledging to kill Filipinos became part of his platform. “Am I the death squad?” he said in 2015. “True. That is true.”

Duterte’s supporters expressed a similar kind of identification. “Where I come from,” one told Evangelista, “most people were Duterte.” Evangelista notes the total devotion conveyed by the absence of a preposition. Duterte was elected because his profanity and threats apparently meant different things to different people. One supporter believed that the people Duterte promised to kill were the sort of people who should be killed. Another insisted that Duterte was just kidding, saying whatever he needed to say to appeal to the masses. He assembled an odd coalition among those who took him at his word and those who didn’t. “To believe in Rodrigo Duterte,” Evangelista writes, “you had to believe he was a killer, or that he was joking when he said he was a killer.”

The book is divided into three parts: “Memory,” “Carnage” and “Requiem.” “Carnage” describes how Duterte made good on his promises that Filipinos would die. The Philippine National Police put the number of casualties at about 8,000 ; Evangelista says that the real total is likely much higher, though even the highest estimate, of more than 30,000 dead, fails to capture the brutality of Duterte’s war. She recounts a few killings in heart-rending detail. One victim was a young man with epilepsy. He was shot, then slapped, then shot again. A 52-year-old mother and her 25-year-old son were killed by their policeman neighbor over an improvised firecracker on their own lawn. Evangelista saw the 11-second video clip filmed by a 16-year-old relative of the victims. Until then, she had been piecing together murder scenes from a hodgepodge of police reports, testimonies from frightened witnesses and grainy CCTV footage.

“There should have been an explosion, a mushroom cloud, something, somewhere, signaling the sudden turn from life to death,” she writes, surprised at how the “tinny smack” of the gunshots sounded so quick and banal. For years, she had been writing about death, and she is startled to realize a chilling truth: “It takes longer to type a sentence than it does to kill a man.”

When Duterte swore his presidential oath on June 30, 2016, he said all the right things — vowing to uphold due process and the rule of law, quoting Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. A few hours later, speaking in a slum, he “let loose the dogs of war,” Evangelista writes. “If someone’s child is an addict, kill them yourselves,” he told his impoverished, cheering audience, “so it won’t be so painful to their parents.” The next morning, a body officially recorded as an “Unidentified Male Person” was found in a local alley with a bullet hole behind his left ear and a cardboard sign on his chest: “I AM A CHINESE DRUG LORD.”

In her book, Evangelista makes us feel the fear and grief that she felt as she chronicled what Duterte was doing to her country. But appealing to our emotions is only part of it; what makes this book so striking is that she wants us to think about what happened, too. She pays close attention to language, and not only because she is a writer. Language can be used to communicate, to deny, to threaten, to cajole. Duterte’s language is coarse and degrading. Evangelista’s is evocative and exacting.

“Journalism,” Evangelista writes, “is an act of faith.” In the Philippines , where a free press has long been a target , it is also an act of courage. She needs to believe that the public ultimately wants what she wants: to have a functional democracy and journalists who are alive to report what they see. Language contains its own contronym — it can propagate lies, but it also allows one to speak the truth.

SOME PEOPLE NEED KILLING : A Memoir of Murder in My Country | By Patricia Evangelista | Random House | 428 pp. | $30

Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times. More about Jennifer Szalai

Rappler Journalist Patricia Evangelista shares stories of trauma and agency with McGill students

A s a part of her tour across Canada, Rappler journalist and 2019 Marshall McLuhan Fellow Patricia Evangelista came to McGill University to lecture on “Reporting the Voiceless: Mainstreaming marginalized issues in the media.” As a reporter and journalist, Evangelista does just that. Her lecture, aptly titled “Covering Trauma,” provided a glimpse into what is needed and required when reporters cover traumatic events and how one can provide a voice to people who are often not afforded such agency. Journalism, as Evangelista made clear, is about real stories and the lived experiences that people face. Subsequently, she presented the potential power and impact that journalism, when approached the right way, can have. In doing so, Evangelista demonstrates a form of journalism that goes against the grain of traditional coverage.

From the outset of her lecture, it was clear that Evangelista goes beyond headlines and click-bait. Beginning with the harrowing story of the Maguindanao Massacre , the deadliest journalism-related event in history, she went beyond the numbers and the bare facts. We heard the voices and stories of the families that the deceased left behind, and when coupled with Evangelista’s ability to convey a story that enables her audience to feel its gravity and emotion, it became clear that covering trauma is something that is inherently personal and ought to be approached with that in mind. Her coverage of Super Typhoon Haiyan , which devastated the Philippines in 2013, followed the same vein. Beyond reporting the number and statistics of the casualties,  Evangelista offered the stories of the survivors, both during and after the storm, and set a scene that illustrated the typhoon’s desperate and life-threatening conditions. As she covered the storm’s aftermath, Evangelista made clear that approaching trauma required nuance, grace, and, most importantly, respect for the survivors, affording them dignity and agency during a time of immense suffering.

Building on this, she tackled the human and sex trafficking that plagues the Philippines. Instead of focusing on the figures and big picture, however, Evangelista told the story and experience of Cassie, a pseudonym of a girl who was once deceived into sex trafficking. Sparing no detail, Evangelista placed everyone in the room in the shoes of Cassie. Again, the focus remained on Cassie and her experience. Even when covering such a chilling and painful story, the emphasis on the human experience never wavered. The story ultimately ended with a rescued Cassie who, in spite of her experience, remained hopeful of her future and refused to let the ordeal define her, demonstrating the strength and fortitude of the human spirit. The optimism would not last, however, as the lecture turned towards Evangelista’s current focus, President Duterte’s War on Drugs. In line with her past work, Evangelista’s award-winning Impunity Series offers more than passing headlines and death tolls. Once more, she provided the human side, chronicling the story of a young girl who witnessed vigilantes murder her parents, all while her father clutched his son in his arms. Despite the attacks on the freedom of the press, she remains committed to telling the human story of Duterte’s War on Drugs. Regardless of her own fears, Evangelista was clear that her job is merely that of a story-teller who is trying to do justice to the courage of those willing to share their stories.

Although Evangelista honed in on events and phenomena that she specialized in, her overall message permeated throughout her lecture. While news and journalism have been criticized in recent years as commodified and sensationalized, reporting on trauma necessitates so much more than covering the basic facts and publishing a story. Rather, covering trauma demands a focus on people, allowing survivors to have agency and control the telling of their story. It requires recognition that, as a journalist, you are present at the worst moments of a person’s life, which, in turn, demands an approach rooted in respect and humility. Often times, coverage fails to do justice to these narratives and voices, leaving them distant, abstract, and often with an aura of hopelessness. Covering trauma, however, must go deeper. It must offer the human story and experience so as to do justice to the courage of the survivors who tell their story. As trauma journalism lays bare the heights and depths of the human spirit, it must personalize and humanize the story, enabling audiences to envision themselves within the narrative. Reporting on trauma is inherently human and personal. Ultimately, Evangelista’s lecture served as a reminder that the fundamental responsibility of the reporter is “to make [the audience] see,” and trauma journalism is “making people imagine.”

Edited by Alec Regino

Chino is a U1 student currently pursuing a degree in Sociology and International Development Studies. He specializes in social change and politics in North America and Asia Pacific.

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Aesthetics and Delivery

Learning Objectives

Have you played charades? Many of you have likely “acted out” a person, place, or a thing for an audience, using only your body and no words. Charades, like many games, demonstrates the heightened or exaggerated use of nonverbals – through acting out, the game highlights how powerful nonverbal communication can be for communicating with an audience.

When speaking, similar to charades, your job is to create a captivating experience for your audience that leads them to new information or to consider a new argument. Nonverbals provide an important facet of that experience by accentuating your content and contributing to the aesthetic experience.

The nonverbal part of your speech is a presentation of yourself as well as your message. Like we discussed in Chapter 7, public speaking is embodied, and your nonverbals are a key part of living and communicating in and through your body. Through the use of eye contact, vocals, body posture, gestures, and facial expression, you enhance your message and invite your audience to give their serious attention to it—and to you. Your credibility, your sincerity, and your knowledge of your speech become apparent through your nonverbal behaviors.

In this chapter, we explore various nonverbal components that influence your message to create an aesthetic experience for your audience. Rather than a check-list of skillsets, we invite you to read these as a series of inter-related behaviors and practices, beginning with eye contact.

Eye Contact

Imagine bringing in 2 qualified applicants for a job opening that you were responsible to fill. The interview is intimate, and each applicant sits directly across from you and 3 other colleagues who are assisting.

While answering questions, applicant 1 never breaks eye contact with you. It’s likely that, as the interview progresses, you begin to feel uncomfortable, even threatened, and begin shifting your own eyes around the room awkwardly. When the applicant leaves, you finally take a deep breath but realize that you can’t remember anything the applicant said.

The second applicant enters and, unlike the first, looks down at their notes, and they never make direct eye contact. As you try to focus on their answers, they seem so uncomfortable that you aren’t able to concentrate on the exchange.

Both approaches are common mistakes when integrating eye contact into a speech. We have likely all seen speakers who read their presentation from notes and never look up. It’s also common for a speaker to zoom in on one audience member (like the teacher!) and never break their gaze.

Eye contact creates an intimate and interpersonal experience for individual audience members and it assists in maintaining rapport. Part of creating a meaningful aesthetic experience is through eye contact, and the general rule of thumb is that 80% of your total speech time should be spent making eye contact with your audience (Lucas, 2015, p. 250). When you’re able to connect by using eye contact, you create a more intimate, trusting, and transparent experience.

It’s important to note that you want to establish genuine eye contact with your audience, and not “fake” eye contact. There have been a lot of techniques generated for “faking” eye contact, and none of them look natural. For example, these aren’t great:

• Three points on the back wall – You may have heard that instead of making eye contact, you can just pick three points on the back wall and look at each point. What ends up happening, though, is you look like you are staring off into space and your audience will spend the majority of your speech trying to figure out what you are looking at. This technique may work better for a larger audience, but in a more intimate space (like the classroom), the audience is close enough to be suspicious. Put simply: we can tell you aren’t looking at us.
• The swimming method – This happens when someone is reading their speech and looks up quickly and briefly, not unlike a swimmer who pops their head out of the water for a breath before going back under. Eye contact is more than just physically moving your head; it is about looking at your audience and establishing a connection.

Instead, work to maintain approximately 3 seconds of eye contact with audience members throughout the room. You are, after all, speaking to them, so use your eyes to make contact. This may also reduce some anxiety because you can envision yourself speaking directly to one person at a time, rather than a room full of strangers.

Remember: you have done the work. You are prepared. You have something to say. People want to listen.

When you (and your body) move, you communicate. You may, for example, have a friend who, when telling exciting stories, frantically gestures and paces the room—their movement is part of how they communicate their story. They likely do this unconsciously, and that’s often how much of our informal movement occurs.

Many of us, like your friend, have certain elements of movement that we comfortably integrate into our daily interactions. It’s important to know your go-to movements to ask: how can I utilize these (or put them in check) to enhance the audience’s experience? In this section, we will introduce how and why movement should be purposefully integrated into your public speech. We’ll focus on your hands, your feet, and how to move around the space.

Gestures and Hands

Everyone who gives a speech in public gets scared or nervous. Even professionals who do this for a living feel that way, but they have learned how to combat those nerves through experience and practice. When we get scared or nervous, our bodies emit adrenaline into our systems so we can deal with whatever problem is causing us to feel that way. In a speech, you are asked to speak for a specific duration of time, so that burst of adrenaline is going to try to work its way out of your body and manifest itself somehow. One of the main ways is through your hands.

3 common reactions to this adrenaline rush are:

• Jazz hands! It may sound funny, but nervous speakers can unknowingly incorporate “jazz hands”—shaking your hands at your sides with fingers opened wide— at various points in their speech. While certainly an extreme example, this and behaviors like it can easily becoming distracting.
• Stiff as a board . At the other end of the scale, people who don’t know what to do with their hands or use them “too little” sometimes hold their arms stiffly at their sides, behind their backs, or in their pockets, all of which can also look unnatural and distracting.
• Hold on for dear life! Finally, some speakers might grip their notes or a podium tightly with their hands. This might also result in tapping on a podium, table, or another object nearby.

It’s important to remember that just because you aren’t sure what your hands are doing does not mean they aren’t doing something . Fidgeting, jazz hands, gripping the podium, or hands in pockets are all common and result in speakers asking, “did I really do that? I don’t even remember!”

Like we mentioned in this section’s introduction, the key for knowing what to do with your hands is to know your own embodied movement and to trust or adjust your natural style as needed.

Are you someone who uses gestures when speaking? If so, great! Use your natural gestures to create purposeful aesthetic emphasis for your audience. If you were standing around talking to your friends and wanted to list three reasons why you should all take a road trip this weekend, you would probably hold up your fingers as you counted off the reasons (“First, we hardly ever get this opportunity. Second, we can…”). Try to pay attention to what you do with your hands in regular conversations and incorporate that into your delivery. Be conscious, though, of being over the top and gesturing at every other word. Remember that gestures highlight and punctuate information for the audience, so too many gestures (like jazz hands) can be distracting.

Similarly, are you someone who generally rests your arms at your sides? That’s OK, too! Work to keep a natural (and not stiff) look, but challenge yourself to integrate a few additional gestures throughout the speech.

Feet and Posture

Just like your hands, nervous energy might try to work its way out of your body through your feet. Common difficulties include:

• The side-to-side. You may feel awkward standing without a podium and try to shift your weight back and forth. On the “too much” end, this is most common when people start “dancing” or stepping side to side.
• The twisty-leg. Another variation is twisting feet around each other or the lower leg.
• Stiff-as-a-board. On the other end are speakers who put their feet together, lock their knees, and never move from that position. Locked knees can restrict oxygen to your brain, so there are many reasons to avoid this difficulty.

These options look unnatural, and therefore will prove to be distracting to your audience.

The default position for your feet, then, is to have them shoulder-width apart, with your knees slightly bent. Since public speaking often results in some degree of physical exertion, you need to treat speaking as a physical activity. Public speaking is too often viewed as merely the transmission of information or a message rather than a fully body experience. Being in-tune and attuned to your body will allow you to speak in a way that’s both comfortable for you and the audience.

In addition to keeping your feet shoulder-width apart, you’ll also want to focus on your posture. As an audience member, you may have witnessed speakers with slumped shoulders or leaning into the podium (if there is one) with their entire body.

Difficulty with good posture is not just a public speaking problem. Think about how often you sit down in a coffee shop, pull out your laptop and, after some time, you realize that you are leaning over and your lower back is wincing in pain. You likely pull your shoulders back and straighten your spine in response. If you don’t focus on this posture (and practice reminding yourself to “sit up straight”), your body may slump back into old habits. So, you guessed it: focusing on good posture is just that – something that you must focus on, over time, so that it becomes habitual.

Focusing on good posture and solid grounding will, in addition to increasing your confidence, assist you in maintaining your eye contact and focusing on projecting your voice throughout the space.

Moving in the Space

We know that likely you’re wondering, “Should I do any other movement around the room?”

Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy answer. Movement depends on two overarching considerations: 1) What’s the space? And, 2) What’s the message?

First, movement is always informed by the space in which you’ll speak. We’ll cover this more in tips on rehearsal (see Chapter 11), but we’ll highlight a few important details here. Consider the two following examples:

• You’ll be a giving a presentation at a university where a podium is set up with a stable microphone.
• You’re speaking at a local TedTalk event with an open stage.

Both scenarios provide constraints and opportunities for movement.

In the university space, the microphone may constrain your movement if you determine that vocal projection is insufficient to guarantee a level of speaking that can be heard throughout the space.

In other words, you need to stay planted behind the microphone to guarantee sound. Partially constraining, this does allow a stable location to place your notes, a microphone to assist in projecting, and allows you to focus on other verbal and nonverbal techniques.

In the TedTalk example, you are not constrained by a stable microphone and you have a stage for bodily movement. The open stage means that the entire space becomes part of the aesthetic experience for the audience. However, if you are less comfortable with movement, the open space may feel intimidating because audiences may assume that you’ll use the entire space.

In addition to the space, your message and content assist in deciding how or why you might move around the space. It’s necessary to ask, “how does movement support, enhance or detract from the message?” and “how might movement support, enhance, or detract from the aesthetic experience for the audience?”

Remember that most public speeches are ephemeral, where the audience is attempting to comprehend your message in one shot or run through. Given these circumstances, it can be tricky for an audience to track the argument progression, especially since you may be dealing with an audience of varying levels of experience with your topic. Similar to the space, thinking through where your movement can assist in translating your information is paramount.

Once you have knowledge of the speaking space and completed speech content, you can start using movement to add dimension to the aesthetic experience for your audience.

One benefit of movement is that it allows you to engage with different sections of the audience. If you are not constrained to one spot (in the case of a podium or a seat, for example), then you are able to use movement to engage with the audience by adjusting your spatial dynamic. You can literally move your body to different sides of the stage and audience. This allows for each side of a room to be pulled in to the content because you close the physical distance and create clear pathways for eye contact.

Without these changes, sections of the audience may feel lost or forgotten. Consider your role as a student. Have you experienced a professor or teacher who stays solitary and does not move to different sides of the room? It can be difficult to stay motivated to listen or take notes if a speaker is dominating one area of the space.

Changing the spatial dynamics goes beyond moving from side-to-side. You can also move forward and backward (or what theater practitioners might call down or up stage). This allows you to move closer to the audience or back away—depending on what experience you’re trying to create.

In addition to engaging with the audience, movement often signals a transition between ideas or an attempt to visually enunciate an important component of your information. You may want to signal a change in time or mark progression. If you’re walking your audience through information chronologically, movement can mark that temporal progression where your body becomes the visual marker of time passing.

You may also want to signal a transition between main ideas, and movement can assist with that, too! Moving as main point transitions embodies the connections between your ideas while letting the audience know that “we are going to progress in the argument.” If integrating movement as a transition feels odd, choppy, or awkward, those feelings help signal that the organization of your main points may need some re-working.

Thus, using purposeful movement can enhanced your aesthetics, but purposeful is the key word here. While movement can enhance, it can also distract and constrain. Keep these common pitfalls in mind:

• The pace-master. We all know this distracting pitfall where (likely due to nervousness), a speaker paces back and forth without any clear reason for the movement. “What in the world are they doing?” you might wonder as an audience member. Unfortunately, if you’re internally asking that question, you’re likely not focusing on the speaker’s content. While it’s OK to “walk and talk” so to speak, avoid constant walking-and-talking. As a speaker, maintain a solid footing when you aren’t moving.
• Obstructing the view: It’s likely that, at some point, you’ll use objects or other presentation enhancements like a PowerPoint or a video during your speech. Make sure you aren’t moving directly in front of the audience’s line of sight. Even if you aren’t referencing something, it can be awkward to walk in front of a projection light.
• The robot : As a dance, the robot can be great, but in public speaking, it’s usually not as effective. We commonly experience students who use “the triangle” method, where each main point in the speech is mapped onto an invisible triangle. This can be done well, but it can also lead to movement looking unnatural. Work to strike a balance between pre-planned and robotic.

When you speak, moving in the space can be beneficial. As you plan your purposeful movement, be aware of the message you’re providing and the space in which you’re speaking.

Facial Expressions

Picture being out to dinner with a friend and, as you finish telling a story about a joke you played on your partner, you look up to a grimacing face.

“What?” you ask. But their face says it all.

“Oh, nothing,” they reply. Realizing that their face has “spilled the beans” so to speak, they might correct their expression by shrugging and biting their lip – a move that may insinuate nervousness or anxiety. You perceive that they didn’t find your story as humorous as you’d hoped.

Facial expressions communicate to others (and audiences) in ways that are congruent or incongruent with your message. In the example above, your friend’s feedback of “oh, nothing” was inconcruent with their facial exressions. Their verbal words didn’t trump their facial expressions, however, and their nonverbal feedback was part of the communication.

Facial expressions are generally categorized as one of the following: happy, sad, angry, fearful, surprised and disgusted. Your facial expressions matter; your audience will be looking at your face to guide them through the speech, so they’re an integral part of communicating meaning and demonstrating to your audience a felt sense.

In fact, if your facial expressions seem incongruent or contradictory from the tone of the argument, an audience may go so far as to feel distrust toward you as a speaker. Children might, for example, say, “I’m fine” or “It doesn’t hurt” after falling and scraping their knee, but their face often communicates a level of discomfort. In this case, their facial expression is incongruent with their verbal message. If you’re frowning while presenting information that the audience perceives to be positive, they may feel uneasy or unsure how to process that information. So, congruency can increase your ethos.

Instead, work to create congruence between your message and expressions. In class discussions on pathos, we often joke about the ASPCA commercials with the Sarah McLachlan song “In the Arms of an Angel” playing in the background. The music is meant to, of course, communicate feelings of sadness around animal cruelty, and rightfully so. In a speech, similar to using music, your facial expressions can assist in setting the aesthetic tone; they are part of developing pathos.

Given the amount of information that we all encounter daily, including information about global injustices, it’s often insufficient to merely state the problem and how to solve it. Audience members need buy in from you as the speaker. Using facial expressions to communicate emotions, for example, can demonstrate your commitment and overall feelings around an issue.

To be clear: facial expressions, like other forms of nonverbal communication, can greatly impact an audience member’s perception of the speaker, but not all audiences may interpret your expressions the same. Re-visit Chapter 2 on audiences.

What you wear, similar to other aesthetic components, can either enhance or detract from the audience’s experience. Like facial expressions, you want your attire to be congruent with the message that you’re delivering. In Chapter 7, we noted that aesthetics are often dicated by certain contextual norms. Context is relevant here, too, as the purpose and audience will inform appropriate attire.

We recommend considering two questions when selecting your attire:

First, “what attire matches the occasion?” Is this a casual occasion? Does it warrant a more professional or business-casual approach? If you’re speaking at an organization’s rally, for example, you may decide to wear attire with the organization’s logo and jeans. Other occasions, like a classroom or city council meeting, may require a higher level of professional attire.

Second, “have I selected any attire that could be distracting while I’m speaking?” Certain kinds of jewelry, for example, might make additional noise or move around your arm, and audiences can focus too much on the jewelry. In addition to noise-makers, some attire can have prints that might distract, including letters, wording, or pictures.

Your attire can influence how the audience perceives you as a speaker (ahem: your credibility) which, as we’ve discussed, is key to influencing listeners. Before we conclude this chapter, we return to credibility and reflexivity.

Aesthetics and Credibility

So far in Part 3 on aesthetics, we’ve discussed how to deliver an aesthetic experience for your audience. As a speaker, it’s important to remember that the audience remains a central component of public speaking and is central to consider when making aesthetic choices.

Yes, this means that you should think about your audience (as Chapter 2 discussed at length) when you are a speaker. These aesthetic choices will influence your audience and assist them in determining if you are credible and, frankly, if they want to listen to your message.

For example, an audience may view vocalized pauses as evidence that a speaker lacks confidence around their topic or does not know the material as well. Similarly, you may consider your attire before presenting, assuming that your audience will respect and view you professionally if you select business casual clothing.

Aesthetic choices are also important when you are in the audience, and it is imperative to be critical and reflect (or practice reflexivity) on how you are filtering a speaker’s information through their aesthetics. The filter that informs our willingness to view a speaker as credible is often based on a mythical norm , or what Audre Lorde (1984) defines generally as young, white, thin, middle-class men. This classification certainly does not fit all speakers, and if you are part of this classification, that’s OK! The mythical norm warns us to be conscious of holding these categories as “the best” or preferred, especially around what counts as credibility. In other words, are these categories unconsciously facilitating a more positive aesthetic experience?

For example, you may decide to wear business casual clothing to increase the likelihood that your audience views you as credible, but as an audience member, be careful assuming that someone is not credible because of their attire. Business attire can be a privilege that everyone cannot afford.

Eye contact can also be investigated. We’ve alluded that eye contact increases trust amongst your audience, and it often does; however, the connection between eye contact and higher levels of credibility is specific to a U.S. American cultural context. Culture thus defines how we interpret and understand certain aesthetic choices, including eye contact. Remember that culture is always a core component of communication. As an audience member, be careful of presumptively judging a speaker based on your own cultural expectations, identities, or positions.

Your nonverbal delivery assists in setting an aesthetic tone for the audience by providing embodied insight into how the audience should think, act, or feel. The space – or literal context in which you’ll speak – also contributes nonverbally to the message. We’ll discuss space in more detail during Chapter 11 on rehearsal.

Up next: presentation aids.

Media Attributions

• Al Gore gestures 1992 © Kenneth C. Zirkel is licensed under a CC BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) license

Speak Out, Call In: Public Speaking as Advocacy Copyright © 2019 by Meggie Mapes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Patricia Evangelista Speech

The sample essay on Patricia Evangelista Speech deals with a framework of research-based facts, approaches and arguments concerning this theme. To see the essay’s introduction, body paragraphs and conclusion, read on.

PATRICIA Evangelista. an 18-year-old communications sophomore at UP Diliman. won the 2004 Best Speaker award in the International Public Speaking competition conducted annually by the English-Speaking Union ( ESU ) in London.

The petite. poised and reasonably Filipina emerged triumphant in a field of 60 contestants stand foring 37 states that are members of the esteemed international British establishment dedicated to the thought of “Creating Global Understanding through English.

Evangelista won her topographic point in the finals after clinching one of two slots in her heat during the tension-filled. heatedly contested forenoon preliminaries held at the ESU central office in London. With the eight finalists known by lunch period. the action shifted to the Kinema theatre hall of the enforcing South Africa House on Trafalgar Square for the decisive confrontation in the afternoon.

Reaction Paper About The Speaker

The seven other finalists came from Malaysia.

Pakistan. Czech Republic. Argentina. Brazil. Morocco and Mongolia. The “native speakers” of English — from the USA. England and Wales. and Australia — had earlier been eliminated in the heats. South Africa. ever a strong rival. besides failed to do it to the finals.

The subject of the competition this twelvemonth was “A Borderless World. ” with as many readings coming out as there were talkers. The diverseness added exhilaration to the event.

Patricia was easy a crowd favourite even during the preliminaries.

Proficient in: English Language

“ Really polite, and a great writer! Task done as described and better, responded to all my questions promptly too! ”

Her address was praised by one of her heat’s Judgess as “very good crafted. ” Her capable affair was the Filipino diaspora and the parts of the planetary Filipino. every bit good as her ain dreams of going abroad but coming back to assist her state.

This. plus the confident. relaxed and prosecuting mode with which she delivered her piece. won the judges’ nod. and for her the award of being the best in a field of outstanding immature communicators from all over the English-speaking universe.

There was a stillness in the hall as the president of the board of Judgess – BBC veteran journalist Brian Hanrahan — announced their “unanimous determination. ” He foremost read out the names of the victors of the “Best Non-Native English Speaker” value — Malaysia — and the runner-up award — Mongolia.

At the reference of Patricia Evangelista’s name as Best Speaker. deafening hand clapping erupted.

Ambassador and Mrs. Edgardo Espiritu and the remainder of the Philippine embassy deputation congratulated the victor. who was in cryings as she called up her parents in Manila on her cellular telephone.

Evangelista accepted her prizes as Best Speaker from Lady Dean of ESU’s board of governors and Dame Mary Richardson. main executive of the HSBC Education Trust and member of the board of Judgess stand foring her bank which is this year’s major patron of the competition.

The Best Speaker received a salver. a certification. a dictionary and an encyclopaedia. She will return to London in November to officially accept her award at the Buckingham Palace from Prince Philip the Duke of Edinburgh who is besides the president of the English-Speaking Union.

BLONDE AND BLUE EYES BY: PATRISIA EVANGELISTA

When I was small. I wanted what many Filipino kids all over the state wanted. I wanted to be blond. fair-haired. and white. I thought — if I merely wished difficult plenty and was good plenty. I’d wake up on Christmas forenoon with snow outside my window and lentigos across my olfactory organ! More than four centuries under western domination does that to you. I have 16 cousins. In a twosome of old ages. at that place will merely be five of us left in the Philippines. the remainder will hold gone abroad in hunt of “greener grazing lands. ” It’s non merely an anomalousness ; it’s a tendency ; the Filipino Diaspora. Today. about eight million Filipinos are scattered around the universe.

There are those who disapprove of Filipinos who choose to go forth. I used to. Possibly this is a natural reaction of person who was left behind. smiling for household images that get emptier with each wining twelvemonth. Desertion. I called it. My state is a land that has perpetually fought for the freedom to be itself. Our heroes offered their lives in the battle against the Spanish. the Japanese. the Americans. To pack up and deny that individuality is equivalent to ptyalizing on that forfeit.

Or is it? I don’t think so. non any longer. True. there is no denying this phenomenon. aided by the fact that what was one time the other side of the universe is now a twelve-hour plane sit off. But this is a borderless universe. where no person can claim to be strictly from where he is now. My female parent is of Chinese descent. my male parent is a one-fourth Spanish. and I call myself a pure Filipino-a loanblend of kinds ensuing from a combination of civilizations.

Each square stat mi anyplace in the universe is made up of people of different ethnicities. with national individualities and single personalities. Because of this. each square stat mi is already a microcosm of the universe. In every bit much as this blessed topographic point that is England is the universe. so is my vicinity back place.

Seen this manner. the Filipino Diaspora. or any kind of dispersion of populations. is non every bit baleful as so many claim. It must be understood. I come from a Third World state. one that is still seeking mightily to acquire back on its pess after many old ages of absolutism.

But we shall do it. given more clip. Particularly now. when we have 1000s of eager immature heads who graduate from college every twelvemonth. They have accomplishments. They need occupations. We can non absorb them all.

A borderless universe presents a bigger chance. yet one that is non so much forsaking but an extension of individuality. Even as we take. we give back. We are the 40. 000 skilled nurses who support the UK’s National Health Service. We are the quarter-of-a-million mariners manning most of The universe s commercial ships. We are your package applied scientists in Ireland. your building workers in the Middle East. your physicians and health professionals in North America. and. your musical creative persons in London’s West End.

Nationalism isn’t edge by clip or topographic point. Peoples from other states migrate to make new states. yet still remain basically who they are. British society is itself an illustration of a multi-cultural state. a runing pot of races. faiths. humanistic disciplines and civilizations. We are. so. in a borderless universe!

Leaving sometimes isn’t a affair of pick. It’s coming back that is. The Hobbits of the shire traveled all over Middle-Earth. but they chose to come place. richer in every sense of the word. We call people like these balik-bayans or the ‘returnees’ — those who ollowed their dream. yet choose to return and portion their mature endowments and good luck.

In a few old ages. I may take advantage of whatever chances come my manner. But I will come place. A borderless universe doesn’t preclude the thought of a place I’m a Filipino. and I’ll ever be one. It isn’t approximately merely geographics ; it isn’t about boundaries. It’s about giving back to the state that shaped me And that’s traveling to be more of import to me than seeing snow outside my Windowss on a bright Christmas forenoon.

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Filipino journalist Patricia Evangelista discusses the nuances of reporting on conflict

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Patricia Evangelista, a multimedia journalist for the online Philippines-based news organization Rappler , examined the responsibilities of journalists telling trauma survivors’ stories in a lecture hosted by the McGill International Review  (MIR) and the McGill University Filipino Asian Students’ Association on Nov. 26. 

As a specialist in trauma journalism, Evangelista has reported on natural disasters, conflicts, and global development issues. Evangelista is the  2019 Marshall McLuhan Fellow , a role awarded by the Canadian embassy in the Philippines to promote responsible journalism and support democracy.

Focussing on current events in the Philippines, she explained that, in covering topics from hurricanes to sex trafficking, special precautions must be taken to ensure the safety and wellbeing of survivors.

“We are voyeurs at the worst parts of [traumatized people’s] lives,” Evangelista said. “It is a privilege to be there. And we can do so much to damage them in the aftermath.”

Journalists, Evangeslita addressed, must use various strategies to avoid causing further harm in forcing people to relive their trauma.

“We offer sympathy, not a claim of understanding,” Evangelista said. “We don’t say, ‘I know how you feel,’ because we can’t know, and to pretend is to patronize and insult them. We accept refusal with courtesy. [….] We offer them control and agency.”

Throughout her lecture, Evangelista referenced stories that she had written about survivors of the 2013 Super Typhoon Haiyan that devastated the Philippines, many of whom had to watch strangers or family members drown during the ensuing floods, as well as pieces on child sex trafficking and state-sanctioned killings. Within the context of these stories, Evangelista recognized the limits of journalism.

“We don’t promise justice or safety or the possibility of a change in policy, because we can’t [do] any of that,” said Evangelista. “We just promise to tell the story the best way [that] we can.”

Evangelista outlined certain rules that should be followed in order to interview trauma survivors effectively and respectfully. Although extracting information from survivors is a delicate task, she claims its necessary to accurately reflect and communicate the realities of conflict to the world. 

“For people to be able to help, to move, to care, they have to be able to see,” Evangelista said. “Trauma journalism is about making people imagine. The rule of thumb is this: If people drown, I need to know enough to drown with them, so I can tell you what I saw.” 

However, as Evangelista explained, survivors of a traumatic event should not be defined exclusively by their pain. 

“The story also involves resilience, courage, the height of the human spirit, the community spirit,” Evangelista said. “All of these are important to the narrative.”

Helena Martin, U3 Arts, shared how the lecture’s subject matter was deeply moving to her because she grew up in the Philippines. 

“A lot of the issues [Evangelista] was talking about were issues [that] I grew up seeing,” Martin said. “Stories about trauma, I could really relate to those more.”

Alec Regino, Editor-in-Chief of  MIR, explained how events such as Evangelista’s lecture can spread awareness of international issues within the McGill community.

“These events [are important] because they allow students to intimately connect with issues from all over the globe,” Regino wrote in an email to  The McGill Tribune . “While it’s valuable to read an article online about the War on Drugs in the Philippines, to hear the lived experiences of people who are directly affected forces you to approach these issues more critically.”

Regino believes that student journalists can benefit from learning how to report empathetically.

“For me, Evangelista’s talk served as a reminder that it is imperative that student journalists provide agency to the people [they are] reporting about,” Regino wrote.

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book talk: Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

Some People Need Killing is Evangelista’s detailed chronicle of the Duterte-backed drug war in the Philippines. Documenting Evangelista’s six-year immersion in the world of policemen, vigilantes, murderers, and survivors, it captures “the atmosphere of terror created when an elected president decides that some lives are worth less than others.”

Considered one of the best books of 2023 by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Economist, it provides a thorough examination of “the grammar of violence” and a critical “investigation into the human impulses to dominate and resist.”

After Evangelista talks about her process of writing and publishing the book, she will be in conversation with fellow journalist Atom Araullo.

For updates on this event, please visit the official Facebook page of the UP Department of Speech Communication and Theatre Arts (DSCTA) .

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Thursday, October 27, 2005

Filipino diaspora by patricia evangelista....

I love this speech it just makes sense.... WHEN I was little, I wanted what many Filipino children all over the country wanted. I wanted to be blond, blue-eyed and white. I thought -- if I just wished hard enough and was good enough, I'd wake up on Christmas morning with snow outside my window and freckles across my nose! More than four centuries under western domination can do that to you. I have 16 cousins. In a couple of years, there will just be five of us left in the Philippines, the rest will have gone abroad in search of "greener pastures." It's not an anomaly; it's a trend; the Filipino diaspora. Today, about eight million Filipinos are scattered around the world. There are those who disapprove of Filipinos who choose to leave. I used to. Maybe this is a natural reaction of someone who was left behind, smiling for family pictures that get emptier with each succeeding year. Desertion, I called it. My country is a land that has perpetually fought for the freedom to be itself. Our heroes offered their lives in the struggle against the Spanish, the Japanese, the Americans. To pack up and deny that identity is tantamount to spitting on that sacrifice. Or is it? I don't think so. Not anymore. True, there is no denying this phenomenon, aided by the fact that what was once the other side of the world is now a 12-hour plane ride away. But this is a borderless world, where no individual can claim to be purely from where he is now. My mother is of Chinese descent, my father is a quarter Spanish, and I call myself a pure Filipino -- a hybrid of sorts resulting from a combination of cultures. Each square mile anywhere in the world is made up of people of different ethnicities, with national identities and individual personalities. Because of this, each square mile is already a microcosm of the world. In as much as this blessed spot that is England is the world, so is my neighborhood back home. Seen this way, the Filipino Diaspora, or any sort of dispersal of populations, is not as ominous as so many claim. It must be understood. I come from a Third World country, one that is still trying mightily to get back on its feet after many years of dictatorship. But we shall make it, given more time. Especially now, when we have thousands of eager young minds who graduate from college every year. They have skills. They need jobs. We cannot absorb them all. A borderless world presents a bigger opportunity, yet one that is not so much abandonment but an extension of identity. Even as we take, we give back. We are the 40,000 skilled nurses who support the United Kingdom's National Health Service. We are the quarter-of-a-million seafarers manning most of the world's commercial ships. We are your software engineers in Ireland, your construction workers in the Middle East, your doctors and caregivers in North America, and, your musical artists in London's West End. Nationalism isn't bound by time or place. People from other nations migrate to create new nations, yet still remain essentially who they are. British society is itself an example of a multi-cultural nation, a melting pot of races, religions, arts and cultures. We are, indeed, in a borderless world! Leaving sometimes isn't a matter of choice. It's coming back that is. The Hobbits of the shire traveled all over Middle-Earth, but they chose to come home, richer in every sense of the word. We call people like these balikbayans or the "returnees" -- those who followed their dream, yet choose to return and share their mature talents and good fortune. In a few years, I may take advantage of whatever opportunities that come my way. But I will come home. A borderless world doesn't preclude the idea of a home. I'm a Filipino, and I'll always be one. It isn't about geography; it isn't about boundaries. It's about giving back to the country that shaped me. And that's going to be more important to me than seeing snow outside my window on a bright Christmas morning.

1 Comments:

naiyak ako reading this again. when I was in 4th year high school my history teacher made me memorize this for my Talent during the Mutya. it's been almost 20years.

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