Assessment reflection

Are zoos still a relevant preservation? –Reflective Statement

I choose to disagree with the controversial question “Are zoos still a relevant preservation?” My reasons are as follows:

First, locking animals up in a zoo supresses the animal’s natural instincts. Instead of hunting, it got fed every day by zookeepers, and the animals idle around. They cannot live and behave like their real self.

Second, some animals are gigantic like whales, narwhals and others and they cannot be confined in zoos. They only way to keep them are safaris and whale watching reserves.

Third, caging animals has harmful effects to the ecosystem. The food chain can be broken because of this. Animals like their natural habitats, not concrete enclosures. We need to respect animal rights. I strongly think that it is a violation of animal rights and the rights to live in their own habitat.

 Finally there are better ways of preserving animals. The more effective ways are: Conservational reserves and National Parks for example, Ku-rin-gai National park. From this way, animals can be protected especially endangered animals but in their natural habitats.

I used a lot of persuasive techniques and these are the techniques I used:

First, I used emotive language; using negative words of high modality adjectives, for example; cruel, miserably, harsh, dreadful, wicked and others.

Next, the persuasive technique ‘Pathos’ was used, which is a technique based on emotions. For example, I used an anecdote to start my speech. It is the story about Tigeru, the tiger, and how he was cruelly taken away by the rangers from his home in the Asian forest to the unfamiliar temperatures and environment in Taroonga Zoo in Australia. By telling a story, I can capture the emotions of my audience

I have some performance considerations to make my speech effective.

First of all, I added expression to my voice to make some parts of the speech effective when I speak. In addition, I used the difference in volume because changing volume can add to emphasis within some sentences and some important ideas.

Most importantly, I tried to speak with eye contact with the audience and had successfully captured their attention because it is essential to look in the audience’s eyes and focus right on them.

Next, I did not read from the notes and rehearsed the speech very well. By referring to the paper too often, the whole performance would be boring!

After that, I used gestures to catch and arouse my audience’s attention because they can focus on what I was saying.

Finally, I used pauses (short moments of silence) to get attention. When the audience is silent, they waited for what is going to happen next. This can create a lot of suspense and change the atmosphere of the whole room.

In summary, I have stated the reasons why I chose to disagree with the topic and the persuasive techniques of Pathos used in my speech. Last but not the least; I used a variety of performance considerations to capture the audience attentions and agree with me with my position of the topic.