Mailing it In Week pt. 2 - Livin' on a Logical Reasoning Prayer

You what sucks about Finals?

They suck. That is called Post Hoc reasoning....or Circular reasoning. Either way, I am screwed because that is part of the material I was supposed to study for my Public Speaking final today. The Final just concluded about 20 minutes ago and I have already begun my prayers. 

Don't get me wrong, I did study....I just happened to study the wrong things. About 50% of the final was standard short answer/fill-in-the-blank fare. I feel fine about that. I know for a fact that I only missed 4 of a possible 52 points. No big deal. The other 50% is a little trickier, however. We had to construct a full speech outline. And is that wasn't hard enough, there are four to five different ways of constructing a speech outline and we had to study all four or five of them because the test would specify which way we had to use. I dutifully studied like I was supposed to. See, I'll show you. The four types of Informative Speech patterns are: Topical Sequence Pattern, Time Sequence Pattern, Spatial Pattern, Cause/Effect Pattern.

So, of course, I sit down to take the test today and find out that we are doing Persuasive speeches, not Informative speeches.

I didn't study Persuasive Speeches.

My grad-student professor did tell us that Persuasive Speeches would be what was on the test. But for some reason, God knows why, I thought that Informative Speeches and Persuasive Speeches had the same patterns. To make a long story short: it turns out that is not the case.

I had to construct an outline on a given topic in a "Statement of Logical Reasoning" Pattern. I have no idea what a "Statement of Logical Reasoning" Pattern is. Well....as a lifelong English speaker I felt like there was a thing or two I could glean from the wording. I made a STATEMENT and then followed it with some LOGICAL REASONS. Who knows? Maybe that's all it takes. But still, I would hate to think that a life-time of Public Speaking training came down to my own interpretation of three words. 

And make no mistake, this has been a life-time of training. I have been speaking in front of people for a while now. There was my sparse theater experience (they're not as fun to say when they are someone else's words), then came the speeches to the congregation at church, then came the High School Speech class with Mr. Popovich and then there was the Commencement speech at graduation. Now all that "experience" comes down to what is essentially a coin flip.

If I guessed correctly on what "Statement of Logical Reasoning" means, then I get an A on the test, an A in the class and everyone is happy (except for those who hate me). If I didn't guess correctly on what "Statement of Logical Reasoning" means, then I get an F on the test, a D or C in the class and no one is happy.

I swore to myself that I would never do this on my blog but...