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Phosphorus: A Speech Analysis

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On April 28th 2017 I went to see a presentation on the importance of phosphorus. The official name of the talk was “Phosphorus Frontiers on a Finite Planet” given by Dr. Eric Roy, who is an associated professor at UVM. The talk was held at the Johnson house located at 627 main street. Dr. Roy was sponsored by the Rubenstein school. He wanted to show the importance of phosphorus, in regards to planting crops, but also the environmental impacts of how we are getting phosphorus. He wanted to demonstrate alternative ways humans could harness phosphorus. The audience he was addressing was very diverse. Students only seemed to make up about half the people in the room. There was a surprising amount of older people at the talk. It looked like most …show more content…

He had a slide show and an obvious direction to his speech. However, there were a couple instances when there was confusion, where people just blurted out questions. When this happened, Dr. Roy calmly clarified and made sure the person understood after he had answered. He seemed to be on the performance side more when talking about is background and work he did. He switched to the communication side when it came to the more scientifically specialized topics. For example, after the slide he asked, “Do you guys understand what phosphorus fixing is?” to get a gauge on how much the audience picked up from him. Dr. Roy’s invention was on par, but nothing extraordinary. He opened his talk by giving background about himself and his work, and said “I did this… but I am not going to talk about that today.” I knew the talk was about phosphorus, but if it were not in the title of his presentation it would have taken me a couple minutes to figure it out. When he did start talking about phosphorus, he clearly stated what it was used for in regards to agriculture, more specifically citing his work in Brazil. He was obviously very passionate about his work and he made that …show more content…

I did not realize how instrumental it is for life. That being said, I did not feel a personal connection with his goal of finding alternate ways of utilizing phosphorus. He made it seem like a problem that was happening very far away, because his work was in Brazil. I think Dr. Roy would have been more effective if he talked about the implications of not doing anything, or not changing the ways we harvest phosphorus. It made his argument less convincing because he did not create a problem to be solved. I was not sure why phosphorus contamination was bad, or where it was happening. He talked too much about Brazilian farmers yields of soybeans, then he diverged to where soybeans were being shipped which made the speech seem less personal and pressing. I am no expert in this topic, it just seemed strange to me that he brought up economics. When thinking back, he was probably trying to show how the increase of soybeans meant more phosphorus would be used, but he did not clearly say that so I was left guessing. He said early on that he was not concerned with the disappearance of phosphorus. At some points I thought it all connected to deforestation, but Dr. Roy only mentioned this fact briefly, so it could not have been. This is what I mean by I was not sure what the problem was. After these points he transitioned to the alternative ways of harvesting

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