Bailey Reflections
The 2020 Bailey Oratorical was the best one I have attended since coming to Juniata. This year’s topic was inspired by the census and asked “What does it mean to be counted?”. I had expected many people to take the census topic in a literal sense where they would talk more about how the country is run and how the census counts and doesn’t count some people. There were those speeches, but there were also arguments I hadn’t ever expected. Taylor Hallabuk had the most interesting argument to me because it felt the most genuine and was the most creative of ways to answer “what gets counted”. Hallabuk’s argument was that we need to count our mistakes and turn them into learning experiences so we can learn to be a more inclusive community. She used her humor, personal experiences, and knowledge to make her speech noteworthy, but unfortunately it did not place for what I assume was because of Hallabuk’s choice of style. The speech felt more like a comedic narrative than a polished speech.
However, Hallabuk’s less defined speech was better than Logan Peachey’s almost perfectly crafted speech. I argue that even though Peachey’s speech met all the requirements for what a speech should have, it did not take into consideration of audience, nor did it directly suggest a solution to his argued problem.
Peachey’s speech had logos with every numeric fact he presented, and then related it back to his personal life or a real life scenario. During these scenarios he referred to only local areas instead of a broader geography, limiting his audience even more than his speech already did. Without these specific references, Peachey’s target audience was younger generations responsible for helping their elderly complete the online census. His primary and secondary audience ended up becoming the elderly themselves because they were the only ones that could relate or feel for Peachey’s argument.
With the specific locations, Peachey limited his audience to only those who were from the area. This made his primary/secondary audience elderly who lived in the area. I assume that this group of people were not the main demographic of the audience, and none of the judges fell into that category as well.
Aside from the audience, Peachey did a fantastic job explaining why his audience should be helping their eldery in being counted, but he never explained any of the consequences if we didn’t take action. He suggested that maybe perhaps things would be cut from funding, but couldn’t give a direct or impactful message about if the audience didn’t do as he asked. This leads to the audience, or at least for me and my friends that I asked about it, not taking his message seriously. The exigency of the prompt was lost within the context of crafting a perfect speech.
Outside of the speech, Peachey’s delivery was also not as strong as the other speeches. As mentioned before, Hallabuk had a more comedic style to her speech which let the audience believe she was confident. Peachey went right after Hallabuk, and did not sound confident about his argument. This isn’t always a bad thing, and should be a good balance of inbetween. I mention that with Sierra Nawalinski in mind. I believe her speech didn’t place because her delivery had me believing her speech was more of a rant than a crafted speech.
Overall, I was very pleased with this year’s speeches. The anticipation of seeing who would win had us all talking about our thoughts during intermission. All of us had different guesses and no one was truly sure who would win. It was truly a great night.
