blog 4

Joshua Ajayi

Mrs.Guarino

Public Speaking

               

                This week in public speaking class we talked about and had to present a spoken word poem of our own or present one of someone else’s. I chose to use a song that I know very well. It’s called “Lose yourself” by Eminem. This is the part of the song that I decided to memorize and recite.

Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted. one moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip?
Yo
His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
There's vomit on his sweater already, mom's spaghetti
He's nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready to drop bombs,
But he keeps on forgetting what he wrote down,
The whole crowd goes so loud
He opens his mouth, but the words won't come out
He's choking how, everybody's joking now
The clock's run out, time's up, over, bloah!”

This song was especially hard for me to recite because I already knew it by heart the way Eminem raps it. One of the things that we talked about is that when you are using or reciting someone else’s work or music, you don’t want it to sound exactly like theirs. You want to make it your own and make it sound different. This was hard for me to do so It too me a while to finally get it down. There is a certain flow and rhythm to this song and it was hard for me to resist following that rhythm and beat that the song brings. We also had to recite it over a song of our choice, and that was also hard as well. The song was specifically designed for the lyrics and vice versa. So i had to find a similar song or beat. I ended up looking up some of Eminem’s song style instrumental and found one that was perfect for the song. I also had to make sure that I was just reciting the song and that I was putting in my own style and rhythm while I was presenting it. I ended up doing a pretty good job on the presentation and even did a good job using hand motions and showing good body language. I seem to be feeling more and more comfortable presenting in front of the class.