Asked by hd
The Moth Presents: Aleeza Kazmi
The Moth
WORD LIST
performance personal account
A. DIRECTIONS: In each of the following items, think about the meaning of the italicized word or phrase, and then answer the question.
1. You are going to give a performance of a story. What would you do to prepare? Who would your ideal audience be? Would you have it written down or would you improvise it, and tell it on the spot?
2. A personal account is a first-person narrative. Think about books you’ve read, radio shows you’ve heard, or television or internet clips that you’ve seen that are personal accounts. Provide one example and state who provided the narrative, what was the medium, and a brief summary of the account.
3. You are making a speech on the Great Depression. How might you vary the volume to enhance your speech?
4. As you consider varying your volume while presenting your speech on the Great Depression, how will your pacing also enhance your speech?
B. DIRECTIONS: Write your own short personal account of an anecdote that has happened at school as if you were going to use it in a performance.
All Answers 1
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A. ANSWERS
1. Preparation for a performance
- Practice aloud several times so your pacing and phrasing feel natural; rehearse standing up and using any gestures you plan to use.
- Memorize the arc (beginning, turning point, end) but not every sentence so it still feels live.
- My ideal audience: people who are present and attentive — classmates, a mixed-age community audience, or a group that values storytelling (e.g., a school assembly or a small listening room).
- Written or improvise? I’d write a polished draft and rehearse it, then perform it from memory with room to improvise. That gives the confidence of preparation while keeping the energy of telling it on the spot.
2. Example of a personal account
- Example: “Tell Me I’m Here,” a first-person story on NPR’s This American Life (or choose another similar show you know).
- Who provided the narrative: an individual who lived the experience (the storyteller).
- Medium: radio show / podcast.
- Brief summary: The storyteller describes a life-changing event from their perspective—how an unexpected loss and the small acts of strangers reshaped their sense of belonging. The account focuses on emotions, specific moments, and personal reflection rather than objective reporting.
3. Varying volume in a Great Depression speech
- Start quietly when describing hardship to draw listeners in and create intimacy.
- Increase volume for shocking facts or when describing crowd reactions or major turning points (e.g., “banks closing,” “breadlines”).
- Use a louder, steady voice for calls-to-action or to emphasize statistics you want the audience to remember.
- Drop to a whisper for poignant, humanizing details to force listeners to lean in and feel the moment.
- End with a controlled, clear volume so your closing thought lands.
4. Pacing to enhance the Great Depression speech
- Slow your pace when conveying loss, human stories, or important conclusions—this gives listeners time to absorb emotion and fact.
- Speed up slightly when recounting sequences or events that build momentum (e.g., run-up to the stock market crash) to create forward motion.
- Use deliberate pauses after important sentences or facts to let them sink in (a silence can be as powerful as words).
- Vary sentence length: short sentences for impact, longer sentences for description.
- Match pacing to volume and content so the audience experiences shifts—quiet + slow for intimacy, louder + quicker for urgency.
B. PERSONAL ACCOUNT (for performance)
On the first day of junior year, I was supposed to give a two-minute “getting-to-know-you” talk to my English class. I had rehearsed a funny story about getting lost in a mall when I was eight—there were punchlines, timing, a perfectly humiliating image of me in a dinosaur T‑shirt asking a mannequin for directions.
I walked to the front of the room with my note cards, felt the familiar fizz of nerves in my stomach, smiled at my friends in the third row, and then, halfway through my first sentence, my throat closed. The punchline I practiced didn’t feel true. I felt ridiculous standing there telling jokes about dinosaurs when, the week before, I had been standing in my kitchen at midnight counting the empty cereal boxes in the cupboard while my parents packed a suitcase.
The joke fell flat. I could’ve shoved the cards back in my pocket and said, “Never mind,” but instead something else happened: my voice shifted and I started to tell the story I’d been avoiding—the one about the night my father left for good. I hadn’t planned to say it. I didn’t want to say it. But when I looked at twenty faces—some bored, some amused—what I wanted was to be honest.
I said: “I thought being brave meant laughing at yourself. Turns out bravery is letting people see the part of you that’s still messy.” I told them about the cardboard boxes lined up on the porch, about the sound of my mother’s suitcase zipper, about the way the kitchen light hums at three in the morning. I told them about the small, ridiculous habit my father left behind—a mug with a chip he would never notice—and how, months later, I still set two mugs on the table out of habit, as if he might come back. My voice shook. I swallowed. I kept talking.
There was a silence after I finished—longer than any pause I rehearsed. The room felt like it had folded in on itself. Then my teacher said, softly, “Thank you.” One of my classmates, the kid who never spoke and always chewed the end of his pencil, stood up and said, “Me too.” He told us his parents had divorced when he was ten. Another girl raised her hand and said she’d stayed up nights counting empty boxes, too. We traded little admissions like baseball cards, awkward and strangely proud.
That two minutes stretched to ten as other people shared the tiny, sharp things that had happened to them—their quiet losses, their weird little rituals. The dinosaur story evaporated. I left class that day with wet cheeks and a sudden lightness I didn't expect. I had gone to the front to perform and, by accident, had given a true thing away. The class wasn’t about me then; it was about the space we'd accidentally made for each other.
Since then, when I prepare a performance, I still rehearse jokes and lines. But I let one true line be my anchor, the part I could always come back to if everything else fell away. Because the surprise of being honest in front of strangers taught me something bigger than applause: people will meet you if you stop pretending you’re already whole.
1. Preparation for a performance
- Practice aloud several times so your pacing and phrasing feel natural; rehearse standing up and using any gestures you plan to use.
- Memorize the arc (beginning, turning point, end) but not every sentence so it still feels live.
- My ideal audience: people who are present and attentive — classmates, a mixed-age community audience, or a group that values storytelling (e.g., a school assembly or a small listening room).
- Written or improvise? I’d write a polished draft and rehearse it, then perform it from memory with room to improvise. That gives the confidence of preparation while keeping the energy of telling it on the spot.
2. Example of a personal account
- Example: “Tell Me I’m Here,” a first-person story on NPR’s This American Life (or choose another similar show you know).
- Who provided the narrative: an individual who lived the experience (the storyteller).
- Medium: radio show / podcast.
- Brief summary: The storyteller describes a life-changing event from their perspective—how an unexpected loss and the small acts of strangers reshaped their sense of belonging. The account focuses on emotions, specific moments, and personal reflection rather than objective reporting.
3. Varying volume in a Great Depression speech
- Start quietly when describing hardship to draw listeners in and create intimacy.
- Increase volume for shocking facts or when describing crowd reactions or major turning points (e.g., “banks closing,” “breadlines”).
- Use a louder, steady voice for calls-to-action or to emphasize statistics you want the audience to remember.
- Drop to a whisper for poignant, humanizing details to force listeners to lean in and feel the moment.
- End with a controlled, clear volume so your closing thought lands.
4. Pacing to enhance the Great Depression speech
- Slow your pace when conveying loss, human stories, or important conclusions—this gives listeners time to absorb emotion and fact.
- Speed up slightly when recounting sequences or events that build momentum (e.g., run-up to the stock market crash) to create forward motion.
- Use deliberate pauses after important sentences or facts to let them sink in (a silence can be as powerful as words).
- Vary sentence length: short sentences for impact, longer sentences for description.
- Match pacing to volume and content so the audience experiences shifts—quiet + slow for intimacy, louder + quicker for urgency.
B. PERSONAL ACCOUNT (for performance)
On the first day of junior year, I was supposed to give a two-minute “getting-to-know-you” talk to my English class. I had rehearsed a funny story about getting lost in a mall when I was eight—there were punchlines, timing, a perfectly humiliating image of me in a dinosaur T‑shirt asking a mannequin for directions.
I walked to the front of the room with my note cards, felt the familiar fizz of nerves in my stomach, smiled at my friends in the third row, and then, halfway through my first sentence, my throat closed. The punchline I practiced didn’t feel true. I felt ridiculous standing there telling jokes about dinosaurs when, the week before, I had been standing in my kitchen at midnight counting the empty cereal boxes in the cupboard while my parents packed a suitcase.
The joke fell flat. I could’ve shoved the cards back in my pocket and said, “Never mind,” but instead something else happened: my voice shifted and I started to tell the story I’d been avoiding—the one about the night my father left for good. I hadn’t planned to say it. I didn’t want to say it. But when I looked at twenty faces—some bored, some amused—what I wanted was to be honest.
I said: “I thought being brave meant laughing at yourself. Turns out bravery is letting people see the part of you that’s still messy.” I told them about the cardboard boxes lined up on the porch, about the sound of my mother’s suitcase zipper, about the way the kitchen light hums at three in the morning. I told them about the small, ridiculous habit my father left behind—a mug with a chip he would never notice—and how, months later, I still set two mugs on the table out of habit, as if he might come back. My voice shook. I swallowed. I kept talking.
There was a silence after I finished—longer than any pause I rehearsed. The room felt like it had folded in on itself. Then my teacher said, softly, “Thank you.” One of my classmates, the kid who never spoke and always chewed the end of his pencil, stood up and said, “Me too.” He told us his parents had divorced when he was ten. Another girl raised her hand and said she’d stayed up nights counting empty boxes, too. We traded little admissions like baseball cards, awkward and strangely proud.
That two minutes stretched to ten as other people shared the tiny, sharp things that had happened to them—their quiet losses, their weird little rituals. The dinosaur story evaporated. I left class that day with wet cheeks and a sudden lightness I didn't expect. I had gone to the front to perform and, by accident, had given a true thing away. The class wasn’t about me then; it was about the space we'd accidentally made for each other.
Since then, when I prepare a performance, I still rehearse jokes and lines. But I let one true line be my anchor, the part I could always come back to if everything else fell away. Because the surprise of being honest in front of strangers taught me something bigger than applause: people will meet you if you stop pretending you’re already whole.
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