Speech class

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I have to take Intro to Public Speaking to graduate. I put it off as long as I could. I tried to take it 3 times before and chickened out. Now I have promised I will not withdraw from the class and have finished over half the speeches.

My problem is the professor is very into people choosing the right topic for the audience but he will not help. His suggestion is to talk about something that interests me and my classmates can relate too. I have Asperger's and other disabilities, am 10 years older than most of my classmates, and I am from the other side of the country. I seriously doubt that my classmates have the same interests. The last speech I did was worth a fifth of my final grade. It was an informative speech. I obsessed about finding the right topic for days. Finally I decided to talk about Asperger's and "Theory of Mind". It did not go over well with the class but maybe the professor will get why I am having such trouble. I haven't gotten my grade yet. The best speech was about making macaroni and cheese.

Now I need choose the topic for my persuasive speech. The assignment says, "The issue should be somewhat controversial, open to debate, and yet NOT intimately familiar to the audience." It should also impact the other students lives. Topics that will cause you to fail: organ donation, abortion, junk food/smoking is bad for you, topics that everyone knows everything about already. I want to do a topic I am passionate about but I can see problems with all of the topics I can think of: PETA is evil (too broad), dog breed bans do not work (California has a law preventing them), Service Dogs in Training should not have public access (how does it affect them, hard to find six credible sources). I think all of these are probably too complicated but I cannot see the simple subjects. My mother thinks I should do "perfume is bad for you" but I just don't feel it.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

You could talk about the government, is it it leading up to its standards should there be a new form of government now? Will Obama help? etc.

Um or you could talk about cancer, there are so many ways you can get cancer these days, from chemicals in chicken, plastic, stuff in walls. etc. Yet we all just sit around not caring about it.

you could talk about global warming, is it a conspiracy? or is it really happening, and if it is who has known about it all along & not told us?

Or swine flu, what is really going on about this problem, it seems it's rave of popularity has ended atm, possibly to soon?

I proberly have the wrong idea about your topic, haha but I hope some of these help you ^

You could do something about disability rights. Most people know on the surface level that there are things like wheelchair accessibility (that should be), and things like that, but when accessibility fails it is generally not apparent to non-disabled people who aren't affected by it directly. Many people don't realize about the damage that pity campaigns do, either, especially if they fear becoming disabled as they age and think of disabilities of all types as something horrible that should be pitied and/or feared.

I was taking an argumentation/speech course in college, and I was also advised not to be too broad or narrow, and we had to do ours in groups. Unfortunately, I decided I wanted to take on a challenge and join the environmental reform group that encompassed solar/wind/nuclear power, and they seemed a bit overly confident about the current capabilities of solar and one of the fellows seemed to buy into some hype against nuclear power and be a bit out there as well, as he suggested (hopefully jokingly?) that we enter the room in big suits pretending as if there was a nuclear disaster. Now, I have a bit of an overly active imagination, too, but that is very hyped, melodramatic and put me off of them.

I wanted to switch groups even though we were supposed to give the first speech in a week or two (although he indicated that he would've let me, since he seemed extremely fond of my first essay, comparing it to work done by post-grad students), but I ended up not having to make the choice, as it turned out that between Japanese 102, guitar, online HTML, and elements of argumentation, I was at exactly the number of credits that makes a student full-time, and since I was a senior in high school, the government wouldn't let me be in the class even if I paid for the final credit out of pocket, sat in and "shadowed" the class for no credit at all (due to "liability issues", even though I said me and my parents could agree to sign whatever waiver they wanted - I was 17 and a half!), and I was not even permitted to withdraw from the online HTML class for a failing W (I hadn't even begun the first assignment yet) so that I could stay in the argumentation class, as the registration deadline had passed and the original registration hadn't gone through! By the end of the whole thing when the person at the office was explaining this all to me I was crying, and she was saying, "Now, now, don't cry - not everyone's even smart enough to do all that when they're still in high school in the first place, and you can register next semester."

I told her, "No, no - it's not that I can't take the class that disappoints me so much, it's that there is so much inanity built into the system that really depresses me." I couldn't take it the next semester anyway since I had to take history since I failed it in high school due to miscommunicated attitude with a teacher who thought I didn't want to take the tests and didn't care about the work and it conflicted with astronomy and astronomy lab, or was offered during high school.

In fact, if I were to re-take the class, I would want to debate on the subject of that rule that someone enrolled in high school can't be a full-time college student even if they pay their way. But it might be construed as too narrow a topic.

I had to take speech for the first university I was at (hated it) and the school I am at now does not require it. I have a feeling that my topics were too narrow. I can't really think of a topic idea for you at the moment.