1. Below is a list of formal speech skills that professionals are often required to exercise. Compare it with your experience and tick the skills that you have experienced. Indicate the order of difficulty (on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is least difficult and 5 is most difficult) involved in you handling the various situations (use the brackets). Compare notes with others in your small group or in the whole class.
a. Serve as leader or moderator of a conference or discussion. ( )
b. Speak to civic or community groups representing your organisation. ( )
c. Present a persuasive case to a management group you know to be completely opposed to it. ( )
d. Speak calmly to a hostile and disruptive audience. ( )
e. Make a speech honouring or paying tribute to someone. ( )
f. Give an after-dinner speech to amuse and entertain an audience you haven’t met before. ( )
g. Answer a surprise question in a meeting, speaking concisely and to the point for some minutes without notes. ( )
h. Address an audience of people from higher management. ( )
i. Adapt a difficult technical explanation to the needs of a general audience. ( )
j. Present a speech organised so that important points stand out and the audience later remembers what you said. ( )
k. Speak easily and fluently to an audience, being confident enough to involve them in a discussion and mixing serious points with amusing anecdotes. ( )