Assignment Details

Ultimately, you will be presenting yourself, and your discipline-related topic, often throughout your career. As you have seen, even the "elevator speech" can carry significance in your communication capability and relationships with others. Small speeches, as well as large, can be important. At this point, you should consider the larger form of presenting. There are a number of things that happen simultaneously, and the more formal presentation is not isolated to a set speech and a set path alone. There are many variables of which you must be aware in a presentation setting, and a number of them, such as technical problems, interruptions from the audience, and even heckling are things that you must learn to ignore or to which you must adapt instantly.  This unit gives you an important opportunity to try out a speech, in an online environment, in a safe relationship with your peers, and with known technologies. Ultimately, you must combine your own self-confidence, with what you innately know that you want to say and talk about. The best presentations come from a balance of passion and reason, so that you and your own background and personality are inextricably bound up with the subject matter.

Part A

Focus your discussion on the following preparation questions:

• What have you found to be easy about your preparations for the presentation? What seemed hard?
• What potential problems might appear in a face-to-face professional presentation versus those that you might anticipate in an online professional situation such as this?
  • How would you prepare for them?
• How balanced was your use of the rhetorical triangle in your planning? Did one aspect take on greater importance and influence than others? If so, which one?

Part B

Focus your discussion on the following background questions:

• How did you approach the merger of your own personal background with the discipline-related topic for your presentation?
• What did you think about as you were putting an integrated presentation together?
• What role did stories or personal examples play in helping you explain and elaborate on your topic?
• What good ideas or potential practices have you derived from the preparation for your own talk or from the discussions and presentations of others?
• Some people are comfortable with outlining, others are not. What do you think? Why?