English 471 / Guidelines for Semester Project Presentations (75 points)

In your project presentations, you should communicate the substance of your term project to the class, in an oral presentation that may involve the use of visual props and/or participatory exercises.  Each presenter can use up to 15 minutes of class time, including q & a.  I would suggest planning to present for eight to ten minutes.  The following points will be key to my evaluation of your presentation:

• The presentation should clearly present your artifact, research question and methodology, and the justification for each.  In other words; why did you choose to do the project you chose to do in the way that you chose to do it?  Answers to these questions can be personal, but they should also be directed to your audience and to the context within which your artifact has its primary meaning.  In other words: what will your study reveal about your artifact that could be of significance to others interested in your artifact? 
• In your presentation, you should be able to offer the preliminary findings of your study.  While it's o.k. to present these findings as works-in-progress, you should be able to present them in a clear and organized fashion--exhibiting that you're well on the way to the kind of finalized presentation of findings that you'll need for your essay.
• You should present your study as clearly as possible.  This may involve using visual representations to help your audience recognize and retain key concepts.  Certainly, this involves establishing clear relationships among the various elements of your study.
• As a presenter, you should be clearly well-prepared.  You may want to use note cards, and it’s acceptable to read short passages, verbatim, from your paper.  However, a well-prepared presenter should be able to deliver extended passages without too much guidance from notes.  Many successful presentations use visual props as a way of engaging the audience’s focus in specific ways, taking some of the pressure off of the presenter’s physical performance.  Another important strategy is audience participation.  If you’re asking questions, remember to give the audience time to think and answer.  You may also want to develop multiple ways of asking the same question (a technique called “parsing”). 
• Finally, you’ll need to keep control of your time.  You don’t want to find that your presentation is over, after only three minutes, and it’s definitely not acceptable to go over the 15 minutes allowed (it’s actually quite rude, in situations like these, to take time away from the next presenter).