Why Speaking is a Skill by Ariana

Why Speaking is a Skill by Ariana - July 2026 Scholarship Essay

I am a high school student about to enter my senior year. I love learning for the most part. I have taken many AP classes and have always taken pride in my ability to ace advanced classes and learn new topics. There was one class I really dreaded, though, Oral and Interpersonal Communication. I did not see a point in taking a class that was just reading about communication styles, writing a speech, and giving that speech. The topic really didn't seem important to me. I already knew how to speak English and communicate with people. I struggled to maintain friendships and keep conversations from drifting into awkwardness, but I wrote that off as a character trait of mine.
Other classes already make students do presentations, so what is the big purpose of a class just devoted to that? Well, turns out, I wasn't actually that good at speeches. I wasn't able to write a speech that was interesting and informative. I would always lean towards having too much information in my essays and having a stale speech. After a while of huffing and puffing about the class being unnecessarily hard, I started to get better at writing speeches, nothing spectacular, but after a while, I was able to write an engaging speech.
Learning about communication techniques and how to phrase information in engaging ways really improved the way I spoke. I started using some of these techniques when speaking to people casually, and I noticed people responded more effectively when I spoke. Almost all skills are taught; almost nothing is innate. We pick up things from peers or are directly taught. Learning about interpersonal communication, despite being a hard topic for me to succeed at, really helped me develop communication skills and helped me view conversation more deeply, to understand not just how to talk to others, but how the choices in speech change a person's whole view of you and how you come across. Overall, the class helped develop my critical thinking skills beyond basic school subject matters, like algebra and english, I learned how to view my communication choices, something that affects every choice I make.