A Story About Knots and Surgeons

Speech Analysis  

When you think Gavagan’s incident he was lucky. Obviously not lucky it happened to him, but lucky he survived. His chances of living were one to none due to the location he was stabbed, all the blood he lost, and just the whole situation. When Gavagan began his speech, he began it with a recent memory, one that occurred on the bus with some medical students going somewhere. Which then led to the memory from quite a while ago, one that he will never forget, nor those that have heard his story. Gavan began to tell the audience of the day he had been walking and out of nowhere was stabbed. He told us of his own experience of the incident and everything that occur that night and for time he was in the hospital. I am still curious as to how he remembered all that happened, cause I barely remembered what happened yesterday let alone, what happened the last time I was in an ambulance, or in the hospital. But something as big and traumatic like that maybe I would.

Gavagan’s story has brought him quite a bit of reputation on both TEDTALK and The Moth. His story was based on his own personal experience and when doing so it is difficult to tie in additional information through statistics without ruining the meaning of the speech. He was able to not only have the audience understand, but in return gained an emotional response, which could also leave a “footprint” on their lives.  Gavagan used a lot of emotion throughout his speech because he wanted the audience to understand how emotional it was for him.

Gavagan’s delivery of his speech was well done. It wasn't the best; however, it wasn’t the worse. He had a few flaws, but I feel maybe if he had more preparation and more practice he could have been all set. One of his biggest flaws was eye contact: he looked down a lot instead of at the audience. He used um a lot which made me feel that he wasn’t really prepared, or like it was just a last minute thing. He told the story in a way that was allowing the audience to visualize the situation, which also helped them to understand his story. He gave many different scenarios throughout the speech, connecting them in a way that allowed his speech to flow very well. Also he does not use very much supporting evidence which is easy to understand because of the topic he chose. However, his supporting evidence was told from his own personal experience therefore it's pretty much obvious that you would be able to know he was telling the truth and not making something up on the spot. You could also tell he was telling the truth by the amount of emotion he put into it. Also as he is telling us this story he is showing us with his body where everything that happened had occurred. Like when he was telling us about the incision that he had on his stomach he had his hand right on where it was.