“It was definitely different. In the Parli Pro, Ag Communications and Ag Sales, you go up with others behind you. You go in and make eye contact and talk to a few people. You have to adjust to go in there by yourself,” Puckett said. “I entered the Creed Speaking contest as a freshman. I was nervous last year and wanted to do better this year.”
The high school experience, especially in FFA, has been a boost to her confidence, she said.
“The person I was in middle school could never have done this,” she said, but then admitted to some nerves. “I did not eat breakfast that day.”
The speech can be on any topic related to agriculture and is five to seven minutes long. She chose food waste because of an emphasis on it last summer looking at how to cut down waste.
“My strategy was a problem/solution approach to climate change. The end was a call-to-action statement,” she said. “I opened with a story about Thanksgiving, about how it is tempting to take a lot of food but saying we should cut down to what we need.”
She said her action statements suggested things like shopping with more thoughtful grocery lists and ordering less in restaurants.
Puckett’s trip to third place in the state contest started with a sub-district competition in which she won, competing against only one other person, and then the district, in which she finished second with the top two moving on to the state competition. At state, they were assigned to one of two rooms with 10 in each and the top finishers moving on to the finals.
“I gave the same speech again to a different set of judges and we were ranked on that. We had to answer questions, too,” she said. “Seven minutes seems like a lot of time. We were graded on the question participation as well as on the speech. I had a lot of information to cut down.”
She said she began working on the speech after returning from winter break with FFA Advisor Carley Snider coaching her. She used five sources for her information in writing the speech. Work on the speech was done around preparations for the other team events in which she was involved but said since this was an individual event it did not depend on others’ schedules.
“Miss Snider coached me. It was good to get time to make a connection with her. That was cool,” Puckett said. “After the speech was written, it was just memorization. Miss Snider made me give it to the freshman class two or three times.”
She said she was asked about restaurants in the question period of the state contest and had the statistic that 15 percent of food waste is generated in restaurants.
She said FFA has a beginners public speaking contest for freshman and sophomores and she looks forward to entering the advanced level competition next year.
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