Speech

4-1 Write a Compelling Blog

This project addresses the basics of developing a compelling blog and successfully engaging a readership.

Purpose: The purpose of this project is to review or introduce the skills needed to write and maintain a blog.

Overview: Post a minimum of eight blog posts in one month. Your blog may be new or one you have already established. You must receive approval from the vice president education to blog on behalf of your club. Deliver a 2- to 3-minute speech at a club meeting about the impact of your blogging experience. You may choose to have your blog evaluated by members of the club. Submit your signed Project Completion Form to the vice president education to receive credit for this project.

Speech timings: 2:00, 2:30, 3:00

Script

Let’s be honest, unless you have ground-breaking news about Biden being a lizard or a lion roaming the streets of Berlin, nobody will read your blog.

And you just have to accept that! I started writing my blog during my last year of university. I must confess that I was lied to by Medium and those other blogging platforms. They made me think I could just earn passive income by writing average blog posts on their platform. That I wouldn’t need to find a proper job and could retire on a beach in Vanuatu before I’d even started working properly. Aaah, was I naïve! That didn’t happen of course, but I’m still hopeful, maybe this speech and the outreach I’m doing now will boost my numbers up.

Nevertheless, saying to people “I have a blog” makes you look really cool, and makes your email signature more potent. But seriously, I really appreciate my blog because I use it as a way to tell my own story, in my own way: I choose the narrative, the angle and how I portray myself.

Being able to tell my own story gives back the power of employment and income-finding into my own hands. First, I choose who I want to be, what I want to work on, what I find interesting and important. Then employers, collaborators and academics contact me because their project or opportunity suits me, and not the other way around. Instead of changing yourself to fit a job, you let the suitable opportunities find you! At least that’s what I tell myself, this hasn’t worked just yet, I am still painfully applying to jobs and universities, but I really do believe that in time this will pay off.

My blog has forced me to expand and make my own personal website, I was sick of paying for Medium, these rascals were taking money off me instead of growing my bank account. I’m pretty proud of my personal website, considering I don’t have any front-end knowledge, thank you obscure stranger on GitHub providing templates!

I even have a small section where I post my Toastmaster speeches, scripts and videos. This enables me to share them with friends and family, not to rewatch them myself, God forbid. Although I am selective about who I send which speeches too: my parents would freak out if they saw how I talk about them in my speech, or my ex about how I talk about her mom.

Blogging has taught me to write and organize my ideas better, I really feel like my written communication improved. It has also had an impact on my speech writing at Toastmaster. Overall, I enjoy the fact that it’s a relatively well-curated summary of my professional and academic career. I would really encourage anybody to have their own personal blog and website, just don’t expect anybody to read it or earn any money from it! Just do it for the love of literature, art and prose!