Keynote Address #2
Delivered by Helen Roper

Ms. Peck, my public speaking classmates, gathered friends and children:

Here we are at the end of the Fall 2002 Principles of Public Speaking class! In the beginning, we came to this little room not quite knowing what was going to be in store for us. We were among strangers. We were nervous. When we got up here, some of us froze at the podium. Some, like me, had shaking hands and legs. Voices trembled. With each speech, however, we got better; with each speech, we learned something, not only about ourselves, but also of each other. We learned to encourage each other: a smile, a nod, a round of applause at the end of each speech showed us that we knew what it was to be up here trying our best, and that gave us a bit more courage to come back, get up here, and try it again.

We started out strangers, but ended up a team.

I believe this class was just as much about each of us encouraging and learning about each other as it was learning the mechanics of a good speech. And, we did it, we’re done, and each of us should congratulate the other on the grand finish of a 4-month expedition. I believe that we have become stronger, more capable, and more adept at public speaking.

The 4-month journey in this little room has changed each and every one of us. We’ve learned a bit about using our voices. We’ve learned how to stand up and be heard. We learned speech tactics that we’ll be able to use again and again and again.

I’m going to leave here and apply what I’ve learned to many more speeches that I’ll be giving in the future. My group will be the better represented because of what I’ve learned here. What will YOU do, when you leave this little cocoon, with your new public speaking skills?

Perhaps a few of you will be able to go into a corporate conference room and wow the socks off of a Board of Directors. Some of you may be able to use it to land that promotion, new job, or a raise in pay. Others of you may use it to better communicate to a room full of students.

However, James Herrick wrote in his book, The History and Theory of Rhetoric, “This is because rhetoric is, among other things, the study of how we organize and employ language effectively, and thus it becomes the study of how we organize our thinking on a wide range of subjects."

Perhaps, then, these newly learned skills would be more often put to use in our day-to-day meanderings through Life.

We’ll use our speech skills to complain, perhaps to a shopkeeper about a defective product we’re returning, or to our doctors, when we try to explain just HOW something hurts. We’ll be able to better communicate with our spouses or significant others. We’ll be able to explain to our child the birds and the bees or why he or she can’t listen to the newest release by Eminem. We’ll be able to better sort through the rhetoric of political candidates to make wiser, more informed choices in choosing the leaders of our city, state or nation.

What I’m trying to say here is that each of us has learned something that will make life just a little easier, a little more manageable. We can say that we’re not to be counted in that group of Americans that say public speaking is a fate worse than death. We can say, to loosely paraphrase Julius Caesar: We came to this little room, we learned to speak, and we will leave here and conquer.

Thank you!