Purpose: To inform the audience of my love for words and why they are so important to me.

Organizational Pattern: Topical

COM Tech Uses: wordle.com (learned from Wally Metts), blog

• Opening: “Words – so innocent and powerless as they are standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.” [QUOTE] [pause]
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne was right when he said this.
  • A dictionary is just a book full of words and their meanings
  • But, these words can be combined to create stories, bring people together and make people feel something.
• My love for words began the moment I could pick up a crayon and write “words” on a piece of paper.
  • [STORY] My mom often tells me the story about how I would write letters.
  • They weren’t anything I would consider pretty, but I covered each and every piece of paper within my reach with scribbles that represented words and handed them to all the members of my family.
  • They kept them for as long as they wanted, some were even displayed on the fridge.
  • My mom saved a few as a reminder of my childhood.
  • Once I started school and was able to actually form words, I started keeping a journal.
  • It wasn’t like any normal journal, I just wrote lists and lists of words.
  • I never combined them or formed sentences.
  • I never thought of them as complex.
  • I was enjoying the words in their simplicity.
  • My mom once told me that my grandpa said that I was going to be a writer.
  • But when I was kid I wanted to be a teacher.
  • And now, here I am at Spring Arbor majoring in writing.
  • I’m pretty sure his sense was right.
  • Even my grandpa saw my potential at an early age.
• My love for words also stems from their ability to bring people together.
  • Parents always remind their children that they love them.
  • If a girl’s boyfriend is smart, he tries to tell her that she’s beautiful on a daily basis.
  • We send each other messages on Facebook and chat with everyone on Skype.
  • I love to write notes to the people I care about.
  • Without words we wouldn’t be able to share our feelings with one another.
  • A written article can draw a group of people together because they agree or disagree with it.
  • A speech can start a demonstration.
  • A simple note can make a person smile.
  • And people are brought together.
• Words when combined can stir emotions in people that they weren’t expecting.
  • Even as a writer I experience this feeling.
  • [STORY] The summer before my senior year in high school I spent two weeks in Zambia, Africa.
  • When I came back I asked the advisor of my school newspaper, that I was going to be editor of, if I could write about my time there.
  • The experience itself was emotional, but writing about it gave the trip a whole new meaning.
  • Just as background information, ¾ of the students at my high school were Muslims.
  • I was going to be writing about a Godly experience in a mostly Muslim public school.
  • In my first article, I wrote this paragraph: Could you live without your cell phone for 15 days? Have you ever had to boil water just so you could brush your teeth? Have you ever had to wash all your clothes by hand? Could you live for two weeks without your favorite food? Have you ever been to a place that doesn’t have toilet paper? Have you ever traveled halfway across the world just to hug a little kid?
  • It was followed by what I think were two simple, yet powerful words.
  • I have.
  • I made my readers think and I gave them something to connect to.
  • I was trying to make them feel something.
• Closing:
  • Words may mean more to me than any other person in this room.
  • I think of them in a way that is different than most.
  • One day they will be how I earn my living.
  • I didn’t pick my career path because I knew it would make me a lot of money.
  • I chose it because I love words and the power that they hold.
  • If you look up word in the dictionary the definition you see is “one of the units of speech or writing that native speakers of a language usually regard as the smallest isolable meaningful element of the language.”
  • But to me, they’ll always be more than letters put together in different combinations with various meanings.
  • They will always be something I love.