Oral Presentation

To be honest, I did my presentation slides and outline before reading the Lunsford article. So I wouldn't say that my presentation was informed it. The article made enough sense, but it pretty much had the general advice that people always give about oral presentations (consider who your audience is, try to catch their attention, repeat yourself, use clear visuals, practice, etc. etc.).

In terms of my presentation today, the #1 thing I'm worried about is going over time. I practiced a couple of times, and I came in between 2:55 and 3:42 on different times, just depending on how long I took on each topic before moving on. It's sometimes hard to figure out how long you've been standing up there when you're giving a presentation! Oh well, I'll just try to move briskly through everything and hope I get done in time.

I've also been thinking about whether or not I spent too much time on the introduction and not enough time elaborating on my research. I like my intro because I think it's interesting and will get people to pay attention, but I'm not sure if all of it is completely necessary for the presentation - I could have spent more time elaborating on the topic.

I was also considering whether I stuck too closely to the format of my written proposal. I did stick to the same sequence, but I made an effort to translate it into oral and visual rhetoric rather than written. But it's not anything incredibly new and original, like some of the things mentioned on the course website (movie trailer, expose, etc.). I think it gets the point across, though.

I think that my Powerpoint slides should be helpful and keep everyone's attention. That's what I spent the majority of my time working on for the presentation. I had to wade through a lot of pictures to find ones that worked. Not to mention worrying about size and picture quality. I also learned how to use this cool program that Macs have called "Grab," which makes it really easy to take a screenshot (that's how I did all the images of the Google pages).

Well, we'll see how it goes.