Terry Benzia
Special to In Motion
A powerful skill needed to succeed in school and a career is public speaking. Daytona State College’s speech classes, Toastmasters Club and the Writing Center help individuals master this much-needed skill.
“Seventy percent of the adult population has speech anxiety and there are strategies to manage and overcome that. Everyone has a story. We help students find the passion in their story. Fear comes from not knowing what to say and we can work on that,” says Holly Hollins, Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Speech.
Michael Brown, a current DSC business student completing his AA, gives credit to his speech class for helping him overcome anxiety of public speaking. Brown gave his first public speech outside the classroom while inducting a colleague into the Daytona Beach Bowling Association Hall of Fame.
“Before my speech class, I would have not accepted the invitation to speak in front of a group. Just the thought of speaking would make me nervous, my palms would sweat and I would feel a layer of fog and pressure come over my entire body. I was fortunate that Professor Hollins has a way of working with students that just helped my body flip the switch from being nervous and scared to being confident. When I speak now, I know what I am going to say, and it comes from my heart, not from fear,” Brown says.
Professor Hollins is also a member of the Talk of Daytona-Toastmasters Club that meets on the DSC campus. Toastmasters International is a nonprofit educational organization that operates clubs worldwide for the purpose of helping members improve their communication, public speaking, and leadership skills. Toastmasters is not just for DSC faculty. Students can also attend and benefit from the program.
Arva Campbell, a DSC Bachelor’s of Applied Science in Communications 2010 graduate, is one of these students. Campbell started to overcome her shyness and crippling fear of public speaking by taking a speech class at DSC and furthered those skills through Toastmasters.
Campbell is now the Center Manager for Career Source for Flagler and Volusia County where she manages more than 35 employees and works with job candidates to build their communication skills.
“Public speaking is a skill that makes a huge difference for job candidates. It is the best personal and professional development for anyone in building their confidence and increasing their value in the employment market. It’s an important skill that will make a candidate stand out from the crowd,” says Campbell.
Another resource to assist students, staff, faculty and alumni of Daytona State and the University of Central Florida with building important communication skills is the DSC-UCF Writing Center.
The Writing Center offers assistance with all stages of public speaking. It is located adjacent to the Library, Building 200, right behind the manatee fountain on the Daytona Beach Campus.
“We help students with any type of communication in any part of the process. We are here to help with preparing, writing, creating and practicing public speaking for presentations. We have an area downstairs called The Cellar where we have presentation resources students can use to practice their speeches,” says Shannon Murdock, Senior Staff Assistant at the Writing Center.
Take advantage of DSC’s public speaking resources that include speech classes, Toastmaster club meetings and the Writing Center. Anyone can overcome the fears they have about public speaking. It is possible to develop confidence, leadership skills, become a more critical thinker, fine-tune verbal and nonverbal communication skills and have better employment opportunities. This one important skill can lead to greater confidence, success in school, career opportunities and in everyday life situations.
Toastmasters meets the first and third Tuesday each month at 4 p.m. in Building 110, room 102. It does not meet on holidays. Be looking for two new speech classes this fall. One will be a primarily online speech class that meets face-to-face four times over the semester and the other, team-taught with Professor Hollins and English Professor Michelle Lee, is a combined English/communication course.
Students will meet Tuesdays and Thursdays, first in Dr. Lee’s class where they will learn how to write speeches as part of the ENC 1101 course, then they will go to Professor Hollins’ SPC 2608 class and put those skills into practice. Students should enroll in both of these linked courses to take advantage of the novel offering.