Oral/Multimedia Presentations

Andrea A. Lunsford

The oral script for the presentation

Your task for this major assignment is to take the wealth of material you have gathered during your research and mine it for a ten-minute presentation, supported by multimedia, that will be spellbinding to your audience. To do so, you’ll need to prepare a script that opens with a strong “hook,” presents your main idea in a clear and memorable way, and uses evidence drawn from your research to illustrate and sustain your point. Remember what we’ve learned about what constitutes strong oral style:

· Lots of signposting that directs your listeners

· Purposeful repetition

· Use of direct address

· Engagement of the audience

· Avoidance of indefinite pronouns,vague references, and long or complicated sentences

· Clear and explicit transitions, and long complicated sentences.

Finally, remember to include a Works Cited list with the script.

The multimedia component of the presentation

Beyond the script, you will need to orchestrate the other media you will use so that everything supports the message you want to get across. Some of you may decide that you want your presentation to be accompanied and supported by a Website that you design. If you choose this option, please let me know as soon as possible so that I can point you to some specific sources for designing effective Websites.

In our class, I am assuming that many if not most of you will use presentation software such as PowerPoint to accompany and support your script. If so, plan to be careful in your use of this tool. You are aware, no doubt, of the controversy surrounding PowerPoint and other presentation software: Edward Tufte, Professor of political science, computer science, and graphic design at Yale, has famously proclaimed in Wired that “PowerPoint is Evil: Power Corrupts and PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely” (September 2003). Sherry Turkle, psychology professor at MIT and author of the acclaimed Life on the Screen, is also skeptical of PowerPoint, noting its tendency to oversimplify and to leave speakers and viewers with the perception that the points on a slide are logically coherent when, in fact, they may have very little to do with one another. And you may have seen the often-reprinted New Yorker cartoon featuring the devil sitting behind a desk and demanding from one of his workers a “new torture.” “Have you heard of PowerPoint?” the worker asks.

For all the criticisms, however, presentational software is increasingly in use and increasingly powerful in helping scholars to present the results of their research. Your job in the upcoming assignment is to use presentational slides to their greatest advantage. In our class, we want no “death by PowerPoint.”

Your job, if you are going to use PP slides for your oral/multimedia presentation, is FIRST to think of the slides and screen as a complex visual layout that engages (or does not engage) your audience. In this case, both images and words count as visuals. As Leslie Marmon Silko says in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, “In the creation of the text itself, I see no reason to separate visual images from written words that are visual images themselves” (195).

SECOND, remember that the rhetorical pisteis or proofs are always at work in such a layout: think of how you arrange graphics, images, and words and the relationships you establish among them as the logos of your slide/screen. Think of the emotional power of all your visuals as the pathos of your slide/screen; and think of the professional quality of design and credibility of the claims as the ethos of your slide/screen.

We hope that your immersion in graphic narrative, along with the discussions we have had in both large and small groups, have helped you think critically about the way visual and textual information are combined and intertwined. As you begin work on your multimedia presentation, you may want to think back on those discussions, look at McCloud or some pages of graphic novels that you have found particularly effective.

Types of Visuals

Decorative visuals are ones that make an aesthetic or emotional contribution to your presentation. Such visuals can serve as a strong “hook” at the beginning of the presentation, but be aware that they can draw attention away from you and your message, especially if used too much. A presentation on the benefits of open-source software might show an attractive diagram representing the Linux operating system. Such a decorative visual can get audience attention but it is up to you as the presenter to show its relevance and to move on once you have gotten the benefit of its “hook.” As with all visuals, you need to ask yourself how relevant this one is: does it contribute to audience attention or distract form it? Does it have little relevance to your presentation? Does it appear without any explanation?? If you answer yes to any of these, you should consider dropping the visual.

Representative visuals represent or symbolize an idea, concept, or artifact. You can think of these representative visuals as metaphors—like the logo of a product or the hood ornament on a car. Such visuals can often help your audience grasp your ideas clearly and quickly. So these visuals can be memorable—but they can also lead to stereotypical thinking.

Organizational visuals guide your listeners, much as signpoint language does in either oral or written texts. In PowerPoint, the most common organizational visual is the bullet point, and you can use these to good advantage. But remember that these organizational guides may actually be a sham: in other words, they may suggest an order—chronological, let’s say, or logical—when that order really does not exist. So consider other kinds of organizational visuals, such as a flow chart.

Interpretive visuals work to clarify complicated ideas, processes, or systems, and so they demand explanation from the speaker as well as some additional visual aids, such as text labels, arrows, etc. Such visuals might include graphs, maps, pie charts, models, diagrams, and other complex drawings.

Words and images . . . verbal and vocal information

Oral/multimedia presentations combine the visual power of the screen with the verbal power of the rhetor or speaker. You need to think carefully about how to put all the parts of the presentation together (the words you say, the movements you make, the slides you show) in such a way that your audience experiences this presentation as a seamless whole. In short, the rhetorical challenge of the oral/multimedia presentation is to orchestrate the entire effect and to be aware at all times of how what the audience is seeing relates to what you are saying/doing. Nothing will help more with this aspect of the presentation than practice, and here’s where I and our OCT consultants come in. We are all ready and willing to participate in practice sessions.

Remember, as you prepare, that in our presentations, the slides can never stand on their own: let’s think of these oral/multimedia presentations as “stand aside” presentations, that is as ones where you stand aside from your slides and the audience experiences the visual/verbal/vocal effects. In no case should you read from PowerPoint slides: in fact, your words should be distinctly different from the slides, though they should be explaining the visuals that appear. End your PP with a slide of your Works Cited.

Logistics to consider

• For presentations in class, it makes most sense to have ALL of them loaded onto one computer; this helps avoid having to shift between machines and thus wasting time. REMEMBER: If you have an audio file (or several) as part of your PowerPoint presentation, you must move the audio file as well as the slide file. For best results, save the slides and the audio files in one folder; then move the folder onto your data key, and send both to David.
• Think about whether you want to use a laser pointer to help with the slides; also think about what other props you might want to use, ones that would engage the audience.
• Think carefully about size, color, font, etc. Make sure that your font style and size is easy to see and understand from the back of the room. Check that color combinations doing obscure your point and that they are easy on the eyes. In addition, consider the ratio of text to image or visual and try to minimize the amount of text on any slide.
• Consider your use of sound/audio: any sound should be more than mere decoration—it should help make your point.
• Prepare for the worst to happen: print out all slides and have a copy on hand, just in case!
• Finally, think carefully about your use of body language, about your dress, and about how you move around during the presentation. Make a mental image of yourself doing this presentation and “rehearse” that image several times. What overall effect do you hope to create with your personal appearance and actions?

Before you have a formal practice run . . .

• Go over your script again once more, very carefully. Note everything you can about how you can impr

• Work once more on your introduction and conclusion. How does the introduction hook your audience and make them want to hear more? How does the intro make absolutely clear to the audience what is going to come in the presentation. In the conclusion, make sure to repeat your thesis and summarize your points before you move in for the big finale, what ancient rhetoricians called your peroratio.
• Make sure to coordinate what you SAY with what the audience members SEE. You can, of course, work directly with the notes option in PowerPoint (look for the box at the bottom of each slide page that allows you to “click and add notes”) Or you may want to key slides to your script.
• Make sure you use plenty of signpost language in the presentation. And remember that rhetorical figures can help to make the presentation memorable: check out anaphora, epistrophe, zeugma, alliteration, or chiasmus on The Forest of Rhetoric--http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm
• Visualize your presentation from beginning to end, watching yourself in your mind’s eye—especially how you will move. Also practice speaking clearly and with enough force to be heard at the back of the room.
• Think about how you might get your audience involved in the presentation and try this out on friends.
• Finally, arrange for a formal practice session that will be taped, with a media center if your campus has one or with friends if not. Take time afterwards to watch and listen to the taped presentation very carefully, taking note of things you want to improve.

For the presentation….

· Make sure to get a good night’s rest and to eat a good breakfast.

· Dress for success: you want to look good but you also want to be comfortable so you can move around with ease.

· Practice one last time.

· Give yourself a pep talk; you’re going to be GREAT.