Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: Ted talk - Essay Example

Her opening word in her speech is “I”, which she continuously repeats during the duration of the speech. This creates the tone for the rest of the speech and it makes the audience ready to listen to her personal experiences. The poetic manner in which she delivers the speech also makes it outstanding. The speech has gone down the history books as one of the most viewed TED talks with its hits exceeding the millions. Her use of a persuasive language and her professional background in the field of nueroanatomy makes most of the presentation enthralling and captivating to the audience.

Her first sentences give the audience her extensive background in the study of the brain; this goes a long way in winning her some trust from the audience. With trust, an audience will easily pay attention to what a speaker is saying in their presentation. She presents her thoughts in an organized manner starting from the reasons that she opted to pursue a career in neuroanatomy. For a person who experienced a stroke, the audience finds it impressive how she almost perfectly recollects the incidences that occurs to her during her stroke.

Any excellent speech relating to a particular event must properly and articulately place the various pieces that constitute the events in their time chronologically. For this reason it’s easy for her audience to believe her and continue to pay attention to the speech. Dr. Taylor’s narrative in her speech is full of metaphors. She equates the two sides of the brain to the computer’s parallel and serial processors. She also makes extensive use of props to draw her listener’s attention. Two minutes and thirty seconds into her speech, she calls for an assistant from the backstage who shows up with a real human brain.

Such was unexpected from the audience and their awe is visibly heard. The speaker makes great use of her stage presence. She is mobile, maintains a direct eye contact with her audience and humorous at times. A good example is at the third minute and forty five second when the audience is left in stitches when she returns the brain to her assistant and with a light touch claims that “it had been a joy”. The red circular carpet is strategically placed on the stage to attract all the audience’s attention to the speaker.

She limits her movement within the red carpet so as to retain this attention. She also makes an extensive use of gestures to emphasize on key points. When she talks about the wholeness of the body four minutes into the speech, she stretches her hands from her feet to her head in a gesture that symbolizes the involvement of the entire human body. When she refers to the pounding pain in her head she gestures to the audience with one hand on the left side of her head to show them the exact location of the pain.

The gestures help the audience to comprehend what the speaker is saying. Tonal variation is another tool of speech that Dr. Taylor puts into effective use. It helps her to mix the eloquent with the emotional. It’s a humbling moment for the audience when she describes her mental faculties fail. She varies her tone depending on the intensity of the subject that she wants to communicate at a particular point in her speech. At the climax of the speech as she talks about t