Yeah, most people hate oral presentations. Why? Because we have to get up in front of a bunch of people and talk about something while in the back of our heads we know we are silently being judged, scrutinized, and critiqued by every single person that is watching. Because we know there’s a chance that someone might fall asleep. Because oral presentations are basically performances, and performances make us nervous! The list goes on and on and it’s different for each person. But we all get through them in some way or another because we possess at least one of the necessarily skills to make an oral presentation happen.
After countless elementary school and high school presentations (we all did them), I think I have this whole “oral presentation” thing down to somewhat of a science. The key to a good presentation starts with your content. You can be the best presenter in the world, but if you have lousy content, you presentation is obviously going to be lousy. By collecting and properly organizing all my information, I better prepare myself for the whole “presenting” part. The next step, the beginning of the presentation, is the part I have the most fun with. I like to create the most bizarre and quirky way to catch my audience’s attention so they realize that I might actually have something interesting to say and they can sleep later. When developing the body of the presentation, I always try to add little funny remarks or jokes in order to keep the audience interested as well. Conclusions are usually the parts that I have a problem with, because “And..uhm, yeah! So..that’s my project.” isn’t exactly a professional and mature conclusion to ANYTHING. I would like to pretend that I have some good advice on making good conclusions, but I honestly don’t. This is definitely something that I need to work on.
In terms of communication skills and dealing with nervousness, there are a few areas where I struggle, but I am slowly learning how to overcome those struggles. For example, I tend to talk WAY to fast, so I lose my audience when I am speeding through complex ideas and concepts. This is probably due to the small amount of nervousness I experience whenever I perform or present. The only way I can improve myself in this area is just to practice, practice, practice! In terms of communication skills, I am very confident that I need little improvement here, because I have never had any issues talking to other people. I look them in the eyes, I act naturally (facial expressions, gestures), I speak clearly with annunciate my words, and I remain energetic and interesting when I communicate (because I usually love the topic I’m talking about!). I also enjoy making people laugh, so I usually make an effort to do so at least once during my presentations.
Oh dear. This is the conclusion part that I am bad at. Let’s see if I can give this a decent effort.
“In conclusion, I am looking forward to bettering myself in the field of oral presentations because I know that it can only help me in the future.”
Wow. That’s very stiff, formal, and somewhat cheesy. Let’s just go with “And, uhm..yeah so that’s my blog post”.
Signing off in 3…2…1…
*click*
After telling others that I was studying New Media, I would usually get a “what the heck is that?” kind of response, and I would throw around some words that usually didn’t fit together or makes sense because I found it hard to explain myself, and I really didn’t want to sound stupid because I didn’t even know how to describe my own program. Thankfully a definition like this can be understood by most people…I hope.
Due to the fact that the world is almost COMPLETELY internet based, blogs can serve a useful purpose in today’s society. Blogging can be used as a method of expressing specific information to large audiences, making an individual’s search for a certain kind of information much quicker and easier. For example, if I was a crazy cat lady and I needed to find information relating to specific breeds of cats, I could read blog posts by a user who updated a blog about the different breeds of cats. This would remove the time spent searching through the internet to find the website that exactly suited my crazy cat lady needs. A less unorthodox example would be a photography student following the blog of a famous fashion photographer to learn tips and tricks for creating interesting photographs and gaining insight into the world of photography as a career.
be required to cover when I am updating this blog. When you aren’t speaking directly to someone (i.e. typing) you don’t have to worry about the other person getting bored with what you are saying, you don’t have to stop and grab your smartphone or tablet to refer to a certain piece of information on the internet, and you can discuss your specific topic without getting tired (unless you are not an online gamer and you haven’t trained your fingers to work the keyboard for hours on end). In many cases I have to limit my intellectual conversations with someone due to the commitments that the world bestows on the physical being (sleep, food consumption, better things to do). In a blog, I can type and type and type and you can read as much or as little as you want, but all of the information that I am aware of will still be conveyed, whether you like it or not.
Julia Wice 