For my seventh project in my Toastmasters Competent Communicator manual, “research your topic”, I presented a talk entitled “Were the Catholics Framed?” This looked at whether the gunpowder plot was actually a set up by the Protestants, to frame the Catholics and increase the persecution.
Much like the arguments made that 9-11 was allowed to create an excuse to invade Afghanistan, the claims against 5-11 are almost certainly untrue as well. Not that there isn’t good evidence, but if you compare it to the Moon Landings, there is what looks like good evidence to suggest they were faked too – but when you dig a little deeper, you soon find the evidence isn’t so good, and you need very good evidence to belief a conspiracy theory.
I felt the talk went well, and managed to see off some good competition to take another Best Speaker ribbon – my fifth overall, and forth in a row. That said, there is certainly some room for improvement.
Part of my talk included a letter, which I read out, but having learned the letter I decided not to glance at it. This was a risky strategy because it might look to some people as if the letter wasn’t genuine, and indeed one person said he had wondered this. The letter was of course genuine, I had just prepared reasonably well, but maybe a few fake glances down at it would have been helpful.
Given the time constraints, I also cut some material out and hoped that it still all made sense. It did, except perhaps for my use of the word recusancy – the act of not attending CoE services, a crime that Catholics were often fined for.
I also felt I could have worked more movement into the speech, though nobody pulled me up on this in the evaluation or feedback. In any case there is work to do – as I write this, we are only 26 days away from the first round of the Public Speaking World Championships – and I haven’t started my speech yet!
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Tags: catholics, gunpowder plot, guy fawkes, history, public speaking
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2013 at 11:35 am and is filed under Public Speaking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.