Commencement Speech

The process of writing a commencement speech is something completely foreign to me.  I have only seen one actual graduation speech throughout my high school career and before I got the chance to listen, I had to leave.  Other than that, all of the speeches I know of are the ones we had read and listened to in class.  I started this completely blind.  Due to that, I am somewhat struggling with writing the speech that we were assigned.  In order for me to help myself, I attempted read as much of Peter Elbow's novel Writing with Power; however, it did not help that much simply due to the fact that I struggled trying to understand his advice.  Despite the mind blocks that I am experiencing, I believe I am making pretty good progress.

Carl Aquino's speech had inspired me and assisted quite a bit in my writing process.  Since he was a high school student, I was able to somewhat connect to what he was saying and that helped me figure out what kind of tone I should use for my speech.  Of course my speech probably won't be as good but it is a work in progress. The theme of my speech took a bit of time for me to come up with but once I had that down, the rest kind of came flowing in afterwards but there are improvements that need to be made but that is understandable considering it is nothing more than a second draft.

As I wrote the commencement speech, it made me finally come to the realization that senior year is finally here and soon after, we'll be entering the adult world.  It is terrifying yet exciting at the same time.  I hope by the end of this year, I'll be mostly prepared for college.