Persuasive Speech

This week went very fast, because we just focused one class on preparing our persuasive speeches and the other two clases were for the oral presentations of each one. I talked about a topic that I found very interesting: "Should there exist stricter laws for endangered species?". I liked this topic because I thought that I could find a lot of information about it and I could include a recent topic on my speech, that was about the organization of Greenpeace that is currently trying to save the Arctic from the oil companies. I gave my speech on Friday, I knew all the information that I was eager to give; however, I didn't got a good grade, I got an 85 and I think it was because I talked too much and I didn't make differentiations on my voice while I was talking and it was too monotone.

First Real Exam

October 18

On Friday we had our "first real exam" on our class and it included all the topics that we had seen since the beginning of the semester. The exam was a little bit long, but easy to complete in less than 1:30 hrs. First, we had to make an attention grabber from a topic that was written on the paper, then we had to make a thesis statement on another topic that was also written on the exam. After that, it came what most of my classmates got wrong... the conditionals; however, I got them all correct. Then, the part where I suffered the most.. paraphrasing.. this exercise was hard for me, because paraphrasing includes analyzing and including all the information but with your own words, not just summarizing; nevertheless, I got the two exercises right. The last two tasks were passive voice and punctuation. Passive voice was very easy and I did it very quickly, I think it was because it was the part that I practiced the most. Finally the last exercise was punctuation, it was very easy, but I wrote the last punctuation mark wrong; however, it was my only mistake and I got a really good grade.

Debates

The last week we had out debates in teams of three, they were conformed by a moderator, a person against and a person in favor of the discussed topic. My team was Emilio and Laurette, we deceided to talk about "Charging minors as adults". This debate was pure fiction because we practiced what we were supposed to say each one, when to respond and what to question. The duration of this debate was from approximately 10 minutes, with 2 periods of time for each person to speak.