PRESENTATION GUIDELINES

Your objective is to present your material clearly and enthusiastically. Good organization is key! Here are some pointers to help:

Physical Goals:

• Make eye contact with your audience; don’t fidget, stare at your feet, shuffle your notes, or make other nervous gestures.
• Ideally, you will speak extemporaneously from prepared notes. This engages your audience in a way that reading your presentation cannot.
• Do not “talk to the blackboard”
• Speak LOUDLY and CLEARLY. If you mumble, your audience will not understand you AND it makes you seem unsure of the material.

Visual Aids:

• Overhead transparencies or handouts of your outline are a good idea. If you give me a master copy in advance, I can make the transparency(s) for you. I cannot make copies for each presentations due to financial restrictions, but encourage you to consider making them yourself.
• If you plan to write on the blackboard, you need to compensate for the time lost; it takes much longer to write on a blackboard than most people realize. Audiences get impatient in that “down time.” Also, if you plan to use the blackboard then do so systematically (left to right, top to bottom) so that at the end of your talk your audience has a clear path of where you have been.
• Videos and other AV can be really useful, but use them sparingly; they must have much content and cannot make up the brunt of your presentation.

Organization:

There are many ways to organize your presentation. Depending on the topic, some will work better than others:

1. Chronological approach: if you are explaining historical events and/or developments, a chronological approach will probably work best.
2. Topical approach: if you are explaining a particular aspect (i.e., a topic) of Confucianism, then you will want to introduce the subject and describe its different attributes.
3. Comparative approach: when comparing or contrasting, you should do so either according to a single principle, or according to a single purpose. For example, when comparing Confucius’ ideas with Prince Shōtoku’s, you will identify the principles therein. When comparing the Neo-Confucianism of the Tokugawa period to traditional Confucianism in China and trying to show which one is more effective, you will show the outcomes of each system (and perhaps the problems, too).

In ALL cases, your talk should have an introduction, a body, and a conclusion (just like a term paper).

How a Presentation differs from a Term Paper:

OK, at this point you may be thinking, “why not just write the term paper and read it out loud as my presentation?” The answer is that your audience listens differently than they read. When we read, we can go back and re-read parts we didn’t understand; we can move at our own pace; we have a physical record of the topic. When we listen, we must move at the pace of the speaker. If we miss something, we can’t rewind. This means that the speaker must :

• Choose a pace at which the audience can absorb the information
• Repeat him/herself often
• Give concrete examples of complex or abstract issues
• Pause occasionally to ask if there are questions, and/or if the material is clear
• Be realistic about how much material can be covered. Do not try to make a dozen disparate points; stick to one major point, with many examples and/or much supporting evidence.

Practical Advice:

· Include “stage directions” in your notes. These can include notations of where you should be after 5, 10, 15, etc. minutes; what material can be cut if you’re running over time; the really important points you cannot cut.

· Never apologize. If you say that you don’t like the topic, the audience will wonder why they should. If you say you are a lousy public speaker, your audience will stop paying attention or worse, pay more attention to your presentation style than the content of your talk. Whatever they do, they will not forgive you, so there is no point in apologizing.

· Avoid cute shrugs and a mumbled “I don’t know” in response to a question. If you do not know the answer, explain why, then still give it your best shot.

· Know more about your topic than you present. What you do not present formally can come in handy if your audience has questions, or if you need to provide extra examples.

· Make a conscious effort to avoid “um” and “ah” as interjections. Also make a conscious effort to use precise, clear language. This means changing idiomatic expressions such as “really weird” to something more descriptive, such as “remarkably different, and therefore hard to comprehend.”