PERSPICUOUS

January 18th, 2010

Perspicuous
\per-‘spi-kye-wes\ adj: plain to the understanding especially because of clarity and precision of presentation *

My fear in life (in addition to all things that crawl), is that I may not articulate myself properly when trying to get my thoughts conveyed to anyone who is polite enough to listen. I often find myself in awkward situations, my thoughts never seeming to be interpreted the way I imagined. Throughout my life, I have been in situations that have required me to perfect the art of public speaking, (much to my dismay), or entailed me relaying my feelings to the other individual who was partaking of our conversation. I also often find myself asking if what I am saying makes sense; “did that make sense, because sometimes I don’t think I am articulating myself properly?” Let’s just say I get mixed reactions from that question.
Once such experience that really enabled me to get over my fear of public speaking was my involvement with the Funding Board during my time at La Salle. While a part of The African American Student League, I served on this board, an organization that allotted student associations money for various programs and/or conferences. In addition to serving on the board, I had become quite familiar with appearing before them during my earlier years with AASL pleading our financial cases. As a member of The Funding Board, I perhaps exuded the most sympathy toward the nervous wrecks who timidly set foot into 301.
During the course of the year, I was witness to some horrible presentations. There were groups who didn’t even know their own name, let alone why they needed that extra $1,000.00 for a program which they swore would “benefit the La Salle community.” I was playing a dual role; trying to balance my duty as a Funding Board member and also as an organizational representative who had sat where they had many times. I knew that because I was partial to presentation and an advocate for words, the presentation must be well-formatted, with good intention and well dare I say it, articulate?
One afternoon, after hearing a myriad of horrible presentations, a girl and two young men entered the conference room. I had seen her around the Communication building, heard of her older brother’s reputation within our esteemed program, and knew that whatever she was going to say would be well-done. Their appearance in front of the board was nothing short of confident and extremely perspicuous. I knew as soon as she opened her mouth, she was going to get my vote, just for making me listen to them. As I headed to my afternoon class, (in which I had an oral presentation), I thought to myself, would it be considered plagiarism if I took a page out of her book?

*letter “e” is upside down, producing sound of “uh”