In May of 2008, I will be graduating from the Information and Engineering Management (IEM) program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).  For our graduate project, we were asked to develop and submit a personal development project.  It was required to be related to information and engineering management and consistent with our professional goals.  I decided that I wanted to structure a project around improving my public speaking.

Over the last few years attending IEM, I had gotten used to giving speeches and I wasn't very nervous anymore.  However, I wasn't very good at giving speeches either.  I decided that I wanted to be better than average.  I wanted to be the kind of speaker that people looked forward to hearing speak.  I wanted to be someone that was compelling and interesting when speaking to groups.  Most importantly, I thought this was critical to my future, and I could be better at public speaking.

I have created this site to share what I have learned with you and to document what I did to improve.  For information on how I did this, check out the link called "My project".  If you are just looking for a quick way to improve, read "Better speaking tips".  If you follow this short list, you will notice a quick improvement in your public speaking.  "Resources" is a listing to some of the best books and articles that I found on the subject.  It will save you from some of the trial and error that I went through finding good reference material.  Finally, I think you can learn alot from the examples of others.  In "Learn from the best", I have picked several well know speeches that I studied to improve my speaking.  I hope that this site will help you become a better speaker and that your future audiences will be better off for it.