Practice Extemp & Impromtu

For my first practice impromptu speech, I chose a pretty humorous topic: solving the dating problem at JHU. For the first part of the speech, I think I did a good job of conveying that humor to the audience. After the first few minutes, however, I continually got nervous, which the crowd could definitely sense and was evident in the online video. My anxiety was preventing me from coming up with new "material," solutions for the JHU dating crisis. I think if I had been more relaxed and hadn't thought about the topic that much, I would have been much more relaxed and it would have come out much more naturally. For the second impromptu speech, we pretended we were being filmed for prospective future Hopkins students (i.e., high school seniors and their parents. For this one, I was much more fluid, less hesitant and cut the number of "ums" in half. The second one was a little easier than the first because we are all students at Hopkins and have been here for awhile, so finding things to say about the school, its academics, sports, etc. comes pretty naturally. For the final impromtu/extemp speech, I would personally like to reduce all filler words like "um" and "so" and preferably not say any at all. I would also like to give the speech with no hesitation showing the audience I'm confident and know what I'm talking about. For me, the key is not to over-analyze the speech topic. Since one can't prepare for the topic anyway, one might as well relax and be able to "think on one's feet fast," (i.e, quickly think of solutions for the problem at hand). As long as I am relaxed and don't think too much about the topic, the word flow will be more natural, showing confidence instead of anxiety.