Presentation Blog

When we first started this project I was mostly expecting to not be at my best when putting everything together, and even worse when it came to actually presenting everything. I have been afraid of speaking in front of others for as long as I can remember and I never thought I'd be able to perform well on a project like this, especially as our first major assignment of the semester. I was also worried whatever effort I put into the presentation itself wouldn’t be good enough, that my work would look lazy or uninspired compared to my peers in our group and all the others as well. I’m happy to have been proven wrong in that regard, and that my work stands equally with everyone else’s.


When we first started this project I was mostly expecting to not be at my best when putting everything together, and even worse when it came to actually presenting everything. I have been afraid of speaking in front of others for as long as I can remember and I never thought I'd be able to perform well on a project like this, especially as our first major assignment of the semester. I was also worried whatever effort I put into the presentation itself wouldn’t be good enough, that my work would look lazy or uninspired compared to my peers in our group and all the others as well. I’m happy to have been proven wrong in that regard, and that my work stands equally with everyone else’s 


I don't think I was at my very best when presenting but I did significantly better than I imagined I would. The only thing I would've wished to improve on was being able to recite from memory rather than staring at a makeshift telegraph. I didn’t stumble on my words or stutter that much, though I partially have the screens around the classroom to thank for that. It was very useful having them around, but I still think I should’ve spent more time committing the slides to memory so I could maintain eye contact with the audience. I won’t be too harsh on myself for this though since it was my first time presenting during the semester; there’s still a lot of room for improvement.


I'll admit that I procrastinated a bit when it came to actually putting my slides together. I remember going to the library on the day of our group's presentation just to make some final edits to my slides because I couldn't do so the night before. I've always been a bit of a procrastinator and I am doing my best to combat that this semester but it is a habit I fall into a bit too easily. It’s just too easy to disregard work for stuff like video games or hanging out with friends. I am glad that I did manage to get enough done despite my mistakes. Usually I’ll be up at ungodly hours the night before because I’d spent too much time goofing off to focus on what was important, but I made a game plan for myself and followed through and broke some of my worse habits. I’m proud of myself for that even if it isn’t a huge achievement.


The making of the slides itself was very simple as I split my chapter up with another member of our group. We ended up with less chapters than the other groups so we had to give some chapters two members to make up for that. Chapter 13, the chapter I did, focused on informative speaking. It was nice to be able to go over all the ways that you can create an informative speech and how to make sure it stays engaging and fun while trying to teach an audience about a certain topic. One of my favorite parts of the chapter was the section about the different types of informative speeches and the topics they represent. They were about objects/places, living creatures (human or otherwise), processes, events, and ideas/concepts. I think probably my favorite out of all the different topic groups to explore would have to be the one about ideas and concepts, because it’s such a broad topic that any specific idea or concept could be seen as interesting enough to delve deeper into and research more.


I also enjoyed going over the different characteristics of an informative speech and how to balance them all out to make a promising speech. The characteristics are: meaningfulness, accuracy, clarity, and scope. Though they might be self-explanatory it’s still good to go over them anyways. You want a speech to really connect with your audience (meaningfulness), to be accurate and objective as possible (accuracy), easy to understand (clarity), and not too bloated with unrelated or barely-related information to the topic (scope). It’s a lot of stuff I hadn’t considered before since I’ve never actually written an informative speech myself, but in hindsight it all makes sense. You don’t want to include a horribly outdated and biased source when your purpose is purely to inform, not persuade. You also don’t want to word things in an extremely complicated way assuming that your audience will understand you from the get-go. There’s a lot that goes into making these speeches and I’m very thankful for this presentation for teaching me more about that.


I was a big fan of all the other groups’ presentations as well. I think especially Group 2 had beautiful graphics for their slides and it honestly made me feel a bit jealous that ours felt so plain in comparison. They had a lot of great speakers that recited the information on their slides while also not relying just on the slides for what they needed to say, bringing flashcards or notepads to assist them. The same can also be said for Group 1, of course. They set a very high standard for the rest of us to meet with their presentation and I also enjoyed their graphics as well. It felt like something you would see at an actual TED Talk, very professional and organized.


All in all I think I am overall very satisfied with the outcome of our presentation and my personal work on it. I think Brianna and Bryana both did excellent work with assisting the groups and with their introductions/conclusions for each group. Though I didn’t have a lot to ask them for, the assistance they gave other members of the group was still rather helpful and I’m thankful for their contributions to the project. I hope in the future when I have other projects to do, not just for this class, that I can put everything I’ve learned from this one into practice to keep on improving as a speaker.

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