SPEECH PEER REVIEW

Hello, everyone!

We’re getting closer to the presentation of our final, persuasive speech. We all have our speeches ready and all we have to do now is to improve them further and further. In order to bring our speech to its high level, it’s important to have support from our mates, but it’s more valuable to get a fair criticism of your speech. That is why our professor gave us the following task: evaluate the speech of your partner and let them know what they should improve.

My partner was Saiyyna and I’m going to evaluate her speech: “Giving unsolicited advice and opinions”.

So I’m going to do that with the help of the following exercise from our book:

These are the questions I’m going to answer.

1. The main idea of the Speech is:

Giving unsolicited advice can bring a lot of negative feelings to a person. One should think twice before expressing their opinion about one’s personality, or showing their attitude towards something that is connected with others. Sometimes this attitude may not be pleasant, or even offensive, abusive. This is why people shouldn’t give advice or comments if not asked. 

2. The intended audience of the Speech. 

I think the targeted audience here are people of all ages and social status. Saiyyna didn’t refer to any particular type of audience. The problem can be related to anyone, from peers to complete strangers. As we all are humans and any of us may have a lack in the social culture. The tone is, surely, appropriate. 

3.The attention-getter in the beginning of the speech was asking rhetorical questions:

“Have you ever received some unsolicited comments about your appearance? About your personality? Were there any situations when someone gave you advice that you didn’t even ask for that made you feel uncomfortable? “

Moreover, Saiyyna made a reference to the audience, thus highlighting, that this problem is relevant to us:

“I suppose that many people can relate to this issue. Many of us are exposed to unexplainable aggressive criticism or unrequested judgments.” 

4.The thesis statement is clearly formulated:

“Everyone should respect each other and keep thoughts, ideas about other people, unnecessary advice to themselves especially if they can hurt someone’s feelings.”

However (in my humble opinion), it could be improved by shortening the statement a bit, so that it becomes easily understandable and memorable. 

Here’s my variant:

“Everyone should respect each other and keep thoughts, ideas and unnecessary advice to themselves as it can hurt someone’s feelings.” 

5.The introduction contains an easy-to-follow preview:

“I’d like to discuss the following questions:

· reasons why people shouldn’t give unsolicited advice, opinions;

· actions people should take instead of giving unsolicited advice or opinion.”

6. The whole introduction definitely supports the thesis. 

7. There are several kinds of information given in support of the thesis. They are: Data facts from the article; advice and suggestions; examples referred to the audience; examples from own experience. 

8. I believe, the information provided by Saiyyna was detailed enough. But I would also like to see some details on how unsolicited criticism can result in different psychological problems. That would be useful information for me. 

9.Saiyyna used several linking elements in her speech, for example:

- “I’d like to discuss the following questions”

-  “Now let’s consider…”

-  “Now | we’ll talk about…”

Perhaps, I’d like to see a bit more of them.

10.  To be honest, I find all the information understandable and clearly explained. So, I can’t define and particular paragraph which is hard to comprehend and needs improvement. 

     The only thing I think it’d be right to do is not to separate the following paragraph from the previous one:

“But what should a person do instead of giving unsolicited advice or opinion? Now we’ll talk about actions one should take if he still wants to share with his ideas”.

11.  The speech is grammatically correct. I couldn’t notice any errors in punctuation, spelling or word choice as well. But probably, Saiyyna should replace the pronouns “he” and “she” by “they”, talking about a person, whose gender is not defined.

12.  I liked the body of the speech most, primarily because of the examples and suggestions given there. This information was really useful.

To conclude, I find Saiyyna’s speech super interesting and important to be heard. 

There are only few improvements that I can suggest, but, in whole, the speech is almost perfect.

 I’m looking forward to hearing it soon!