Chapter 11

Oral Presentations

Giovanna Fogli

Introduction

As you did already in high school and most probably you will do for the rest of your professional life, in your college career you will find yourself preparing and delivering oral presentations to a variety of audiences for a variety of purposes. During Winter Quarter, Humanities Core Course is asking you to work in small groups on an oral presentation on Goethe’s Faust. Taking its cues from the ending of the second part of the tragedy, the prompt presents the question of whether Faust’s soul should be allowed in Heaven. Your task is to decide whether the text supports this outcome and make a case according to your findings. As this is an academic assignment, requiring you to adopt the same rigorous scholarly approach you would use for any other college essay, it helps to consider how an oral presentation is different from a written paper. On the one hand you will have the advantage of using more than one medium to deliver your point and to keep the attention of your audience; on the other hand, dealing with a viewer instead of a reader might pose a challenge to the organization of evidence and effective presentation of a logic thread.  When in doubt, a reader can peruse previous sections of a given written text (e.g., an academic essay) to verify that there is appropriate support for a specific point – this advantage is lost in a live presentation.  Therefore, clarity, efficient layout, and convincing delivery are key to successfully proving the validity of an argument presented orally.  Before you start, do not forget to read Prof. Lunsford’s chapter on “Oral and Multimedia Presentations” in EasyWriter, a very helpful guide for this task.

Speaking and Showing: Organizing Your Power Point Presentation

The main purpose of your PowerPoint presentation is to offer a visual anchor to your audience so that their attention is focused on the central points of your argument. Starting from the very beginning of your presentation, your message, point and position, should be clear but not obvious. As the screen shots reproduced below hope to suggest, to reach this goal you should employ images, creative choices of background and other graphic elements discussed, as already mentioned,  by Prof. Lunsford in her text EasyWriter.

However, as this is an academic presentation, each following slide should also contain one clear interpretive claim supported by appropriate evidence:

You should organize your slides in logical order so that the unity of the overall argument is apparent and the resulting outline shows a point-by-point development of your main claim, namely your thesis. Remember that it is better not to send an audience in overload and divert their attention from your own performance. Follow a simple rule for any power point presentation, namely “more is less” – do not ‘over-kill’ when it comes to written text, or your audience will end up trying to decode the text contained in the slide rather than listening to you.  To see what I mean,  look again at the sample slide reproduced above as compared with the much more dense version of the same material below:

Because scholarly presentations require accurate and detailed documentation of sources as well, if you find that citations could overload each slide, you may decide that an appositely prepared hand-out is the most efficient solution.

Preparing the Case

It is important that you consider the scholarly nature of your assignment. You will have to find evidence for your position within Faust I, paying particular attention to the “descriptions of the grounds for salvation and damnation laid out by God in the Prologue in Heaven”; “the precise terms of Faust’s wager with Mephistopheles,” and “Faust’s actions in the course of Faust I”. As a scholarly discussion is a dialogue among experts as well, you will also need to engage a secondary source debating the question of Faust’s salvation as you will learn from the Discovery Task.

This assignment is a collaborative effort, however you will have to first re-read the text on your own, selecting evidence and making observations that you will share with your group in a discussion leading to a shared position on Faust’s salvation.  The end result should be a cohesive, logically structured argument, centered on a clear, arguable main thesis, and supported by appropriate evidence.

Drafting the Oral Presentation

Focusing on the rhetorical aspects of your presentation can help you and your group preparing and delivering a convincing and engaging presentation. Specifically, you should consider,

1. the purpose of your presentation (arguing for a specific outcome for Faust’s soul),
2. the nature of your audience (a competent group, as both your classmates and your instructor share knowledge of the tragedy Faust)
3. the medium (you will show – using an appositely prepared PowerPoint – and tell – delivering a speech)
4. the limits of your assignment (specifically time constraints, as your entire presentation may not go beyond the 20 minute mark)

You can think of ethos, logos and pathos – rhetorical categories discussed elsewhere in this Handbook – as different ways in which you, the author, relate to your audience. How can you establish your credibility and convince your audience that you know what you are talking about (ethos)? What kind of emotional response are you seeking from your audience? What feeling will make them more receptive to your position (pathos)? And – most importantly for your task – what evidence/warrants/claims – what logical organization – will convince them of the soundness of your position (logos)?

As for the organization of the presentation itself, you may decide to structure it according to an essay format and have each participant present one of the key-points of your discussion; or you might assign to each speaker the discussion of a particular source (“Prologue,” one section of Faust I, secondary source, etc.). In any case, you will need to complete your presentation with an introduction and a conclusion and should pay particular attention to have balanced contribution from each group member for the presentation as a whole, with no one having the lion’s share of the work.

Delivering Your Presentation

For this particular oral presentation, reading out loud from a written script is not an option. This requires that you pay attention to not only appropriate word choice, good syntax and style, but the fluency of your speech as well. Oral (your commentary) and visual (slides) elements should be effectively integrated with one another. Rehearsing your speech – by yourself and at least once with your peers – will allow you to improve your delivery technique. Effective posture and gestures; appropriate audibility and a dynamic range of voice, together with good eye contact, will permit you to engage with the audience and enhance your chances for success. Do not forget: this is meant to be a group effort; even though you will be graded individually, the good outcome of this exercise depends on the success of the group presentation as a whole. So, practice, practice, practice!