Thursday, May 06, 2004
Communications 228 Final Exam
Given your experiences this semester, what advice would you give to someone who wanted to produce an oral narrative for radio or web?
Never before this semester, in my life had I ever thought about what goes into producing a radio show. Hell, I don’t think I have even listened to a radio show, so I had never even imagined what type of work was necessary to produce one. At the beginning of the semester however, I listened to the national phenomenon ThisAmerican Life for the first time and I was intrigued if not amazed with what I heard. If you are even thinking about producing a radio show I recommend that you go to this website and listen to as many episodes as you can. Take notes even, because this is what a radio show should sound like.
Over the past semester I, myself, had the first hand experience of producing my own radio show and through this I have learned quite a bit about what it takes to produce one. So if that is what you need to know then I have some advice for you.
The Radio Show which my group and I produced was modeled after the This American Life Broadcasts. That is we used an anecdote and reflection format and I recommend that you use this format if want your show to be anywhere close to a success. The subject of our show was Drug Abuse and Studying. In it we obtained anecdote material by interviewing Students at Denison University and asking what they thought about Drugs and Studying and if they had any funny stories on the topic. Needless to say we got some good ones. The recording device as I found is an important part of the equation. Having crisp, clear recordings is important so that you can hear in detail the reactions of the interviewee. Capturing their mood and the way they act is an important part of the interview. To do this we used our friend’s sound board, The Boff Digital Studio BFF643. I mean, it was the fucking Cadillac of sound boards and I recommend using something of equal quality if you can. Check out ebay to get a good price on sound boards.
If you want some good information on how to get good interview material I recoment that you look at this this Helpful websight. The subject of our interviews was quite personal and in our experiences we found that the most important thing is to keep your interviewees comfortable so that they are as deep and honest with you as possible. We also found was that it is very important to be able to hear how the interviewee reacts to the question. It is very amusing to listeners if you can show when the interviewee comes to a sudden realization. Needless to say it is also important to be clear and precise in your questioning.
Once you have all of the material you will need it is important to go through and select what is most interesting. Some times it is tough to decide on this stuff because you have a plethora of information and you need to eliminate everything that is too boring but what is boring to you might not be boring to your potential audience. The entire process is described best by my group mate Larke.
“You’ll have tons and tons of crap, but crap is great. It’s kind of like when you are writing a paper. Sometimes, you know exactly what you are writing about and you write the paper and hand it in. Other times, you don’t have a clue what you are doing and you just start writing. You write and you write, and most of the shit you write down turns out to be crap, and doesn’t make the final paper. But in this mess of crap, there is some brilliance that makes the heart of the paper.”
Look at Larke’s blogg for some additional information on how to do a Radioo Show.
After you have got down to the material that you want to use you need to put it in order so that it tells a story. This is where the creative thinking comes in and luckily for our group of space cadets we were able to do that quite easily. After we had it in order we had to ad in our reflections which completely link the story. Sometimes they aren’t even necessary and you might only need to separate anecdotes with background music. It is very important to give the listener time in between anecdotes to reflect for him self. If you are going to add in your own reflections don’t try to force the humor in there your self. Try to stick to the basics and be dry. You don’t want your reflections to sound awkward and cheesy that can take the humor right out of it.
After our group was finished with this entire process we put music in the background. Because our’s was about drugs and the mind we used a lot of the Greatfull Dead. We are not exactly finished with this part of our radio show at the moment but we are finding that it makes all the difference in the show as to what types of music you use and when.
If you would like further information on your radio show I would recommend checking out the informative website of my class mate Morgan Kimmle’s Blog I have done a lot of searching on the web and it is pretty easy to find in depth instructional guides on the subject. One of the cooler sites I read was the Pirate Radio Survival Guide
I recommend checking it out. Good luck with your radio show and have a great time in the production process.
Given your experiences this semester, what advice would you give to someone who wanted to produce an oral narrative for radio or web?
Never before this semester, in my life had I ever thought about what goes into producing a radio show. Hell, I don’t think I have even listened to a radio show, so I had never even imagined what type of work was necessary to produce one. At the beginning of the semester however, I listened to the national phenomenon ThisAmerican Life for the first time and I was intrigued if not amazed with what I heard. If you are even thinking about producing a radio show I recommend that you go to this website and listen to as many episodes as you can. Take notes even, because this is what a radio show should sound like.
Over the past semester I, myself, had the first hand experience of producing my own radio show and through this I have learned quite a bit about what it takes to produce one. So if that is what you need to know then I have some advice for you.
The Radio Show which my group and I produced was modeled after the This American Life Broadcasts. That is we used an anecdote and reflection format and I recommend that you use this format if want your show to be anywhere close to a success. The subject of our show was Drug Abuse and Studying. In it we obtained anecdote material by interviewing Students at Denison University and asking what they thought about Drugs and Studying and if they had any funny stories on the topic. Needless to say we got some good ones. The recording device as I found is an important part of the equation. Having crisp, clear recordings is important so that you can hear in detail the reactions of the interviewee. Capturing their mood and the way they act is an important part of the interview. To do this we used our friend’s sound board, The Boff Digital Studio BFF643. I mean, it was the fucking Cadillac of sound boards and I recommend using something of equal quality if you can. Check out ebay to get a good price on sound boards.
If you want some good information on how to get good interview material I recoment that you look at this this Helpful websight. The subject of our interviews was quite personal and in our experiences we found that the most important thing is to keep your interviewees comfortable so that they are as deep and honest with you as possible. We also found was that it is very important to be able to hear how the interviewee reacts to the question. It is very amusing to listeners if you can show when the interviewee comes to a sudden realization. Needless to say it is also important to be clear and precise in your questioning.
Once you have all of the material you will need it is important to go through and select what is most interesting. Some times it is tough to decide on this stuff because you have a plethora of information and you need to eliminate everything that is too boring but what is boring to you might not be boring to your potential audience. The entire process is described best by my group mate Larke.
“You’ll have tons and tons of crap, but crap is great. It’s kind of like when you are writing a paper. Sometimes, you know exactly what you are writing about and you write the paper and hand it in. Other times, you don’t have a clue what you are doing and you just start writing. You write and you write, and most of the shit you write down turns out to be crap, and doesn’t make the final paper. But in this mess of crap, there is some brilliance that makes the heart of the paper.”
Look at Larke’s blogg for some additional information on how to do a Radioo Show.
After you have got down to the material that you want to use you need to put it in order so that it tells a story. This is where the creative thinking comes in and luckily for our group of space cadets we were able to do that quite easily. After we had it in order we had to ad in our reflections which completely link the story. Sometimes they aren’t even necessary and you might only need to separate anecdotes with background music. It is very important to give the listener time in between anecdotes to reflect for him self. If you are going to add in your own reflections don’t try to force the humor in there your self. Try to stick to the basics and be dry. You don’t want your reflections to sound awkward and cheesy that can take the humor right out of it.
After our group was finished with this entire process we put music in the background. Because our’s was about drugs and the mind we used a lot of the Greatfull Dead. We are not exactly finished with this part of our radio show at the moment but we are finding that it makes all the difference in the show as to what types of music you use and when.
If you would like further information on your radio show I would recommend checking out the informative website of my class mate Morgan Kimmle’s Blog I have done a lot of searching on the web and it is pretty easy to find in depth instructional guides on the subject. One of the cooler sites I read was the Pirate Radio Survival Guide
I recommend checking it out. Good luck with your radio show and have a great time in the production process.
Comm 101Final
Given your experiences this semester, what advice would you give to someone who wanted to produce a policy (diliberative) speech for presentation before a live audience?
So you want to write a deliberative speech, huh? Well, then you’ve come to the right person. See four months ago if you come to me with the same task ahead of you I would have sent you on your way. But after the intensive learning experience I have had throughout the past semester I have become well versed in the arts of rhetoric. The first and most important thing that you need in order to make a deliberative policy speech is a policy. I realize that won’t be as much of a problem for most people as it was for our group so I’ll skip over any advice that I might have for you on how to choose a policy.
The next most important thing however once you have your policy is figuring out a method of delivering the speech to your respective audience so that you can gain as much respect and support for your policy as possible. Getting respect from an audience in a policy delivery is no different than doing it in any other social situation; so as you would have guessed, figuring out what type of people you are dealing with is the first step. Then you need to figure out what appeals to these people and where they stand on the political spectrum.
Once you have done this you are ready to start writing your speech. In any persuasive speech there are three main rhetorical styles Ethos, Pathos and Logos. These have been used in persuasion since the time of the Greeks, and all of them are equally important.
Pathos deals with the emotion that you use in your speech. It is found primarily in the text of your speech and it is used correctly to dig down deep into the soul of the audience and get at their feelings. For instance in our speech we addressed the problem low income families and the lack of funding for their children. We used pathos to persuade a wealthy audience to support our legislation for additional funding by making them feel for the poor, helpless children who aren’t getting an equal chance at life. Another way to do this is to tell stories to get the same reaction. In Scott’s Speach
he used pathos by telling the story of an poor old man who got arrested for using marijuana to cure his glaucoma.
Logos refers to the logic in your rhetoric. You can use logic to get your point across by backing up your beliefs through reasoning and justification. To get the audiences support for your policy you might need to use facts and statistics to back up why your change needs to be made. However facts alone are typically not enough to do the trick and in order to fully use logos to your advantage you will need to provide persuasive reasoning of how your change will help. This reasoning is logos.
Ethos refers to something like the character of the speaker ( their “ethics” if you will). Ethos is like how you, yourself as a speaker appear to the audience. This is derived largely from your reputation and your system of beliefs. In using Ethos correctly you must let the audience know that your standard of ethics is as close to identical to theirs as it gets. To help you out, check out this Budget-websight to get a dumbded down analysis of these 3 types of rhetoric.
After you have utilized these three types of rhetoric it will be time to get into a bit more detail. I am talking about putting specific rhetorical figures into this speech of your’s. This was the biggest pain of all in my experiences. Language and writing is not my bag of tricks but I point you in the right direction. Silva Rhetoricae
is a great website which will help you in the learning of all different rhetorical figures and when to use them. If that’s not enough check out My groups speech to give you a few more examples.
The speech writing process is long and bothersome but don’t get too discouraged. Take in to consideration that it is a hundred times easier to write it with two or three people. As I have found. Having another person or two thrown into the process makes a world of difference when you are looking for the right thing to say or when you just need a second perspective on some complicated rhetoric. Make sure your speaker is in on the action. It will be much easier for him or her if they are in agreement with how the speech is written. Writing a speech with too many people however can become complicated when conflicts in opinion arise.
Writing the speech is only half of the deal though.. I was the speaker in our group so I know first hand that quite a bit of behind the scene’s work goes into the delivery itself. You want the audience to know that what you are saying comes from the bottom of your heart and that you are a trustworthy and honorable individual. By this I mean that the delivery is when you want to use ethos to your advantage. Not only what you say but how you say things is important in a time like this and as the speaker you might not always be aware of how you sound to people on the outside of your kranium. Before this semester I was totally unaware of the world of pace, inflection and emphasis which are used in a speech. To find out more on how to use them check out McGuffey’s Readers.
These little tools of communication can make or break a delivery and even though you use them every day it is surprisingly difficult to use them on the level of perfection which will be necessary for your speech. I recommend speaking in front of a friend and have them critique you on how you sound. Then ask for their opinions on where you should and should not put emphasis and inflections. Pace was a tough thing for me to learn. I speak naturally at near light speed and I had to slow it down if in order for my audience to understand me. It was great to see myself speak on camera to get a better idea of how to improve my pace.
How you appear is also an important part. You want the audience to like you right away so it’s a good thing to appear happy and comfortable. Here is some good advice from a class mate of mine, Kyle , on how to start off a speech.
“I have always said that starting a paper, speech, whatever it may be is the hardest part. I find it best to start the speech with a little joke or something to settle the crowd down. This is god because it relaxes the audience and gets them more acquainted to you”
Once you get the ball rolling its all down hill from there, huh Kyle? Well, I hope that I’ve been informative. I wish you all a wonderful speechwriting and delivery process. Thank you, and good luck.
Given your experiences this semester, what advice would you give to someone who wanted to produce a policy (diliberative) speech for presentation before a live audience?
So you want to write a deliberative speech, huh? Well, then you’ve come to the right person. See four months ago if you come to me with the same task ahead of you I would have sent you on your way. But after the intensive learning experience I have had throughout the past semester I have become well versed in the arts of rhetoric. The first and most important thing that you need in order to make a deliberative policy speech is a policy. I realize that won’t be as much of a problem for most people as it was for our group so I’ll skip over any advice that I might have for you on how to choose a policy.
The next most important thing however once you have your policy is figuring out a method of delivering the speech to your respective audience so that you can gain as much respect and support for your policy as possible. Getting respect from an audience in a policy delivery is no different than doing it in any other social situation; so as you would have guessed, figuring out what type of people you are dealing with is the first step. Then you need to figure out what appeals to these people and where they stand on the political spectrum.
Once you have done this you are ready to start writing your speech. In any persuasive speech there are three main rhetorical styles Ethos, Pathos and Logos. These have been used in persuasion since the time of the Greeks, and all of them are equally important.
Pathos deals with the emotion that you use in your speech. It is found primarily in the text of your speech and it is used correctly to dig down deep into the soul of the audience and get at their feelings. For instance in our speech we addressed the problem low income families and the lack of funding for their children. We used pathos to persuade a wealthy audience to support our legislation for additional funding by making them feel for the poor, helpless children who aren’t getting an equal chance at life. Another way to do this is to tell stories to get the same reaction. In Scott’s Speach
he used pathos by telling the story of an poor old man who got arrested for using marijuana to cure his glaucoma.
Logos refers to the logic in your rhetoric. You can use logic to get your point across by backing up your beliefs through reasoning and justification. To get the audiences support for your policy you might need to use facts and statistics to back up why your change needs to be made. However facts alone are typically not enough to do the trick and in order to fully use logos to your advantage you will need to provide persuasive reasoning of how your change will help. This reasoning is logos.
Ethos refers to something like the character of the speaker ( their “ethics” if you will). Ethos is like how you, yourself as a speaker appear to the audience. This is derived largely from your reputation and your system of beliefs. In using Ethos correctly you must let the audience know that your standard of ethics is as close to identical to theirs as it gets. To help you out, check out this Budget-websight to get a dumbded down analysis of these 3 types of rhetoric.
After you have utilized these three types of rhetoric it will be time to get into a bit more detail. I am talking about putting specific rhetorical figures into this speech of your’s. This was the biggest pain of all in my experiences. Language and writing is not my bag of tricks but I point you in the right direction. Silva Rhetoricae
is a great website which will help you in the learning of all different rhetorical figures and when to use them. If that’s not enough check out My groups speech to give you a few more examples.
The speech writing process is long and bothersome but don’t get too discouraged. Take in to consideration that it is a hundred times easier to write it with two or three people. As I have found. Having another person or two thrown into the process makes a world of difference when you are looking for the right thing to say or when you just need a second perspective on some complicated rhetoric. Make sure your speaker is in on the action. It will be much easier for him or her if they are in agreement with how the speech is written. Writing a speech with too many people however can become complicated when conflicts in opinion arise.
Writing the speech is only half of the deal though.. I was the speaker in our group so I know first hand that quite a bit of behind the scene’s work goes into the delivery itself. You want the audience to know that what you are saying comes from the bottom of your heart and that you are a trustworthy and honorable individual. By this I mean that the delivery is when you want to use ethos to your advantage. Not only what you say but how you say things is important in a time like this and as the speaker you might not always be aware of how you sound to people on the outside of your kranium. Before this semester I was totally unaware of the world of pace, inflection and emphasis which are used in a speech. To find out more on how to use them check out McGuffey’s Readers.
These little tools of communication can make or break a delivery and even though you use them every day it is surprisingly difficult to use them on the level of perfection which will be necessary for your speech. I recommend speaking in front of a friend and have them critique you on how you sound. Then ask for their opinions on where you should and should not put emphasis and inflections. Pace was a tough thing for me to learn. I speak naturally at near light speed and I had to slow it down if in order for my audience to understand me. It was great to see myself speak on camera to get a better idea of how to improve my pace.
How you appear is also an important part. You want the audience to like you right away so it’s a good thing to appear happy and comfortable. Here is some good advice from a class mate of mine, Kyle , on how to start off a speech.
“I have always said that starting a paper, speech, whatever it may be is the hardest part. I find it best to start the speech with a little joke or something to settle the crowd down. This is god because it relaxes the audience and gets them more acquainted to you”
Once you get the ball rolling its all down hill from there, huh Kyle? Well, I hope that I’ve been informative. I wish you all a wonderful speechwriting and delivery process. Thank you, and good luck.
This post was suposed to happed on monday but I have had a very busy week and just got around to it. Im taking 20 credit hours this semester and it feels like I have 2 exams in each class. I probly shouldnt have gone to the derby last weekend but Im glad I did. It rained so hard on saturday during the race that the entire infield was flooded. It was like a woodstock of kentucky hicks. Instead of a lot of drugs there was an enormous amount of drunk people who were running around tackleing people in the mud. There was honestly no grass, just mud. And puddles that were at times 2 feet deep. I saw one kid who thought he had found a nice deep puddle of mud, run and dive head first on his stomach. When he stood up he looked like he had seen a ghost because what he had dove on turned out to be concrete with 2 inches of water on it. HIs entire chest and stomach was covered in blood.
Then the first night we got there we ended up sleaping in the back of our cars because we were so poor. I hope that it was the only time Ill ever have to do that. My friend clint was there as well along with a number of the other 228 houlagans.
Then the first night we got there we ended up sleaping in the back of our cars because we were so poor. I hope that it was the only time Ill ever have to do that. My friend clint was there as well along with a number of the other 228 houlagans.
Friday, April 30, 2004
I am desperately trying to finish up on a final paper which is due this monday. Im not going to have much time this weekend because Ill be down in the dirty south at the k. Derby. Last year I had one of the best times of my life. We slept 12 in a small ass hotel room or didn't sleap I should say. This year I am running even lower on bills so my friend Clint and I plan to sleap in our cars. Talk about bums.. we might as well bring some heroin along and skip out on the bars.
Any way Im trying to finish up this stupid paper so I can bounce, but I will get back to blogging when I return on sunday and let everyone know how it went.
Any way Im trying to finish up this stupid paper so I can bounce, but I will get back to blogging when I return on sunday and let everyone know how it went.
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Now that I dont have my computer I have found myself becoming more of a comp. nomad lately. Its kind of cool though its like combining vacationing and work. Like when ever I have to blogg or check my email or even write an assignmanet I get to chose one of my friends computers to do it on. that way I am getting a good change of scenery. This new change in life style has brought back some of my old trickery. My new favorite thing to do is to leave obscene pictures on peoples backgrounds. It is so much fun and it pisses people off so much. Here is a picture that I just left on my friends computer, check it out.
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
I wish I was as sweet as my room mate. He has been getting so much ass lately that he has developed an entirely new personality. I his self image and confidence are unparalelled around the globe. If I had one that even remotely matched his I would be king. I believe he is developing into the alpha male of Denison.
You know what though, not to change the subject but I wish blogger had a spell check similar to that of word. I need my spell checking so bad, you have probly noticed in my bloggs. Sometimes I will go ahead and type in word and then paste them in blogger but that seems like such a hastle. You know what the world needs? we need a spell check system for the internet that is so broad that it can be applied to every link on the internet that way it could be used for emails and im and bloggs ect. But it has to resemble the word spell check system because that one is sweet.
Oh yea I need to drop a post in here. Anyway Andrea my comm 101 partner has an nice blogg that I check out frequently because it allways has new rants which are worth reading if I ever want to get the wheels turning again. Her blogg is also quite astheticaly pleasing with lots of pictures to check out. So check it out some time.
You know what though, not to change the subject but I wish blogger had a spell check similar to that of word. I need my spell checking so bad, you have probly noticed in my bloggs. Sometimes I will go ahead and type in word and then paste them in blogger but that seems like such a hastle. You know what the world needs? we need a spell check system for the internet that is so broad that it can be applied to every link on the internet that way it could be used for emails and im and bloggs ect. But it has to resemble the word spell check system because that one is sweet.
Oh yea I need to drop a post in here. Anyway Andrea my comm 101 partner has an nice blogg that I check out frequently because it allways has new rants which are worth reading if I ever want to get the wheels turning again. Her blogg is also quite astheticaly pleasing with lots of pictures to check out. So check it out some time.
Sunday, April 25, 2004
Our public speaking speach has been coming along quite nicely. I think I am ready for tomorrow. I havent been able to blog much lately and it has been impossible to check my news browser because my computer is out of commission. Actualy not just out of commission, it is fucked. I need to get the entire back panel replaced. So I have to ship it back in to shit ass HP and it wont be fixed for three weeks. How convenient for finals and the job search.
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Im kinda pissed off because its Darren's tank week and I have a paper and a project due tomorrow so I can't go to the Reds game with the rest of the tankteam, which makes me feel shitty and to add to that Im trying to write this paper on my friend moss's computer which literaly has fucking downsyndrome; It has a seven second delay I kid you not. (That was a long sentance) Anyway I am using pussy ass moss's computer bec ause mine is out of comission. That also pisses me off.
Thursday, April 15, 2004
Today our softball team won without 4 of our starting players there. And ........Clint is a pussy.
