Speaking has since ages been an innate human quality. In a contemporary globalized world, effective public speaking has become crucial both at individual and organizational levels. Public speaking as verbal talent posits itself as a “cause” with clear motive to “effect” the intended audience. It enables the speaker to have direct impact upon the audience and thus makes it an effective medium to exercise in diverse situations. However, not all the speakers are able to create the intended effect through their act of speaking due to their unfamiliarity with speech techniques and delivery nuances. Many of us, though competent enough, often feel anxiety about speech when called upon to speak in personal and public domains such as interviews, presentations, meetings, conferences, group discussions and many speaking related challenges in the present day ever changing corporate world. The purpose of this public speaking course is to develop the speech and personality of learners in order to convert them into confident, committed and effective speakers. The course will serve as a guide to various forms of public speaking with relevance to numerous emerging situational contexts and provide an overall development in speech delivery in a perspicuous manner.
Good morning friends and welcome to NPTEL online certification course on public speaking.
I am Binod Mishra, Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
IIT Roorkee.
This time I have floated a new course entitled public speaking.
Now majority of you might be thinking as to what this course can be about and who can
get enrolled in this course and why should they register themselves with this course.
My dear friends, anyone having a basic knowledge of written and spoken English can join this
course.
The title of the course may sound very commonplace, but the content of the course will of course
interest you very much.
My dear friends, speaking is an innate human quality.
Most of you of course a good speaker, yet you cannot deny the fact that when you have
to speak formally you hesitate.
You become anxious as how to start, how to develop and how to keep your listeners engaged
or captivated.
Suddenly you are reminded of some excellent speakers and start thinking how they could
have excelled at speaking.
This is actually called speech anxiety and the technical term for this is glossophobia.
It is quite natural that everyone suffers from this situation, everyone comes across
this situation, but do you know this can be controlled through learning and through practice.
Now as I said what is this course and what could be its purpose?
The purpose of this course is to develop the speech and personality of learners in order
to convert them into confident, committed and effective speakers.
The course will serve as a guide to various forms of public speaking with relevance to
numerous emerging situational contexts and provide an overall development in speech delivery
in a perspicuous manner.
Now most of you also might be thinking as to what could be or the contents of this course.
The course as the title itself says is public speaking and of course we shall be discussing
public speaking as an art because most of you have got ideas, but the course actually
expects all of us to convert our ideas into action.
So the course will talk about the various etiquettes and mannerism.
The course will also talk about the different types of public speaking such as conversation,
speech, presentation, interviews, classroom lectures and many soft, many small and many
big situations where you feel you hesitate.
Of course the course also will train you how to have a command over your voice and vocabulary.
The course will also tell you how one can combine a beauty and benignity through verbal
and nonverbal cues.
The course will also tell all of you how to be positive because positivity is the hallmark
of a good personality and most of you will agree that it is not only your voice that
speaks rather your entire personality speaks.
The course will also tell you how to make effective use of language in different situations,
how you have to address multilingual, multicultural crowds and that is why you also need to understand
the nuances of culture, how one can speak to one and to 1000 because from time to time
the number of your listeners will keep increasing.
But my dear friends, while the course has got all these contents, you might also be
thinking as to what would be the modalities of the course.
The course is actually of 12 weeks which comprise 60 lectures.
The learners will also have weekly assignments, every week they will have assignments and
the assignments will be evaluated and you will also come to know through a sort of appraisal
as to where you are in the course.
The course will have several interactive sessions and the course also will have specially for
those who actually want to appear at the examination, they will also be having a sort of final examination
and all those people who are successful in this course will get certificates of different
types and of course these certificates are to help you as a passport to the journey that
you are going to take forward.
I think the course will have something for everyone because it has been designed in such
a way that everyone will have something to carry back home as a sort of takeaway.
So if you feel the course contents attract you, it is time you join the course before
it gets late.
Enrollments are already open.
My dear friends, one must always remember that all good speakers which one comes across
today were bad speakers first.
So without any further wait, join the course and be a better and effective speaker than
you are.
I look forward to facing to meet all of you in the course.
Thank you.
