My Speaking Inspiration

 

         Greta Thunberg 

          My Speaking Inspiration 

   Environmental activist& climate change activist

Greta Thunberg delivers speeches concerning on-going climate and environmental crises. She has addressed 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference, UK Parliament, and spoke at 2019 UN Climate Action Summit. Great has become the figurehead of the global movement through her school strikes outside of Swedish Parliament and her famous speeches : How dare you? and  The House is on Fire.

She mainly performs persuasive speeches that have challenged the traditional views of many countries and politicians concerning climate change. In her speeches, she has widely criticized world leaders for not taking speedy action to prevent an irreversible chain of disaster. Moreover, she portrays urgent and emotional messages to world leaders that criticized the on-going system of ignoring climate change. One of her main misconceptions that she criticizes is that world leaders turn to kids to solve problems incurred by businesses and government's ignorance toward climate change. 

Greta has two styles of delivery: manuscripts and extemporaneous speeches. 

How dare you?      and            House is on Fire

Her main type of delivery is manuscripts. As you can see in the videos, Greta is holding a piece of paper where she reads out written and prepared speech for word for word while also establishing a frequent eye contact with her audience. Since manuscript speeches are most likely to be found in legal or scientific findings- her style of delivery is most appropriate to her occasion. She lists off important statistics that cannot be memorized right away. Also, her secondary type of delivery is extemporaneous. Here is why. Greta speaks in a very conversational tone and she is also speaking directly by saying words like " you" or " you all" and with honesty. Those are all characteristics of an extemporaneous speech. You can hear that whenever Greta talks- she speaks less formally, even though, her already written speech is prepared in a formal way.  

Structure/Organizational Patterns: 

Greta clearly expresses a chronological and spatial design of speeches. For her chronological design, Greta always talks about the future first and then brings the problems of the future to present. For example, the statistics she utilizes often go from 10-20 years from now, so that the audience can feel the impending doom, but then she sets realistic goals for any country to mitigate the problems of irreversible tipping point of earth's climate crisis. Greta's pattern of speech reveals that she includes her expectations and main arguments in favor of change at the end or middle of her speeches. 

Moreover, for her spatial design- Greta starts from the bottom to top. For example, she explains that global warming will have an irreversible effect that will negatively impact communities, and then starts talking about the collapse of all ecosystems and lastly, she includes the mass extinction of out planet and civilization due to irreversible climate change.

In addition to her speech design, Greta utilizes personal experiences and attention grabbers; however, she rarely utilizes signposts and presentation aids.  In one of her speeches, she cries out " you have ruined my childhood dreams" and " I should be in school". By expressing that-she hopes to make her audience understand how it feels to have an uncertain future filled with responsibilities of climate change. In her point of view, older generations created a mess in environment that future generation have to clean up. Her qualifications are established through proper citing of various scientifically proves sources. 

I believe that Greta's speeches will still work, because climate and environment still do not get enough coverage in the news. Greta's emotional and radical speeches will be always remembered because they didn't fit into standard speech guidelines. For example, most of her speeches were presented in an informal tone, even though, the audience were world leaders and people of higher ranks. Her tone did not match her audience, but it was done to create a rhetorical effect. As she said, changes are done when one speaks clearly and correctly. She meant that many speeches are such  neutral and formal tones that people do not get moved or persuaded effectively. She also feels that formal speeches sugar-coat information, which is why not much was done to stop climate change. 

She is urging many to stop giving change grey areas, but instead give changes radical directions. It should be either black or white. 

Some of the things that I learned from her is that: No One is too Small to Make a Difference. 

Many teens and adolescents are afraid to speak up against injustice, because they believe that change comes from " big shots" and government and that they are too " small" to change world's problems. However, Greta has proved us wrong by being able to sway people's opinions at world forums at age of 15-16. 

Also, some of the things I learned from her speaking style is to never be afraid to make bold statements in speeches in front of the "whole world". In order to move the audience- a speaker has to establish significance of her topic. For Greta, it was our home, our planet, our civilization that she focused on without that focus- a topic of environment would not produce much desired effect.  

One advice I could give Greta for her future speeches is to use presentation aid to show the magnitude of her speech and her main point: Carbon Footprint. Presentation aids really help in focusing the audience's attention onto the topic and will help them visualize the problem rather than just hear it.