Rachel Hanna
@RACHELCH97
On Fri, Dec. 1 in the Las Positas Mertes Center for the Arts, the LPC Forensics Team presented stories and monologues.
The room shared laughter and some shocking moments as the students delivered each of their ten-minute long speeches.
Six students who had prepared for months brought serious, exciting and informative topics to the audience’s attention through each of their oral events.
The evening started with an informative speech and ended with a speech-to-entertain, which visibly brought tears to many people’s eyes as a result of the laughter.
As people filled each seat in the theater, instructor and team coach Janet Brehe Johnson walked onto the stage to give the rundown of the night.
There were two informative speeches, one persuasive speech, one impromptu speech, one prose interpretation speech and one speech-to-entertain, as earlier mentioned.
According to Milla Lindevall, who joined speech team this past summer, “the goal is to have four polished speeches by the end of the school year. So, you start out with one and continue to work on it until you start another speech, but you don’t stop working on the older one too. You never get rid of a speech, you just revise the originals that you created. For speech night, we have all been working on our speeches for three to four months.”
Lindevall went on to explain the intense work that goes into each speech. The process consists of memorization, movement, transitions and smooth delivery.
These actions are all part of the required skills they need to compete, but it also pays off in a sense of improving public speaking skills, confidence in themselves and boosting their resume.
The speech team also allows students to grow in ways they did not know they could.
Lindevall wants LPC students to know that this is not only just a team, but a close family.
With numerous hours of practicing and traveling with one another, these students are so comfortable as to consider each individual their brother and sister, siblings by bonds of trust.
While these students exuded confidence, nerves are considered when they think about doing their performances.
Lindevall does admit she was a little bit nervous. She no longer has stage fright, but sometimes gets the normal butterflies in her stomach that all of us know so well.
“At tournaments we perform in classrooms in front of judges, which is intimate, so it can be more scary. At speech night it was all the lights, mics and production that we weren’t used to, so yeah, a little scary,” Lindevall said.
Despite it being the consistently ranked as the top fear that Americans have, public speaking has helped the team achieve confidence in their voice and a different sense of self worth.
Being able to be a part of something on campus that helps growth in students is often a positive outlet for young adults.
One important development seen is the ability they have to feel comfortable being their true self and voice their opinions.
For the members of this team, their voices have been found and were used to the audible pleasure of the audience present.
