Lesson for Week 13: Day 2
13.2
Send me a progress report and to continue work on your paper.
It has long been a tradition to incorporate oral presentations in upper division writing classes like practical writing or techncial writing. So, even though this web-based class doesn't give you the venue for presenting oral reports, we're going to talk about them anyway. You could, if you took my discussion of media in the last lesson seriously, decide to make your assignment into a parallel media production, creating a paper or brochure to hand out and a speech to give on a particular occasion to a particular audience. If you do that for this web class, the speech would have to consist of 1) an outline, 2) the manuscript version of the full speech, and 3) any visual support (handouts, PowerPoint, poster) you want to use. In fact the speech (outline and manuscript) supplemented by a brochure would constitute a parallel media production, and a speech supplemented by a PowerPoint presentation a hybrid production. But, just so you don't get confused, you don't have to make your production into a speech or into a parallel media production; you may.
Oral reporting is the most powerful medium available to humans. Face-to-face, real-time encounters are rich in various levels of information (body language, facial expression, language, gesture, etc.) and they allow the speaker to recognize immediately how the communication is going. Despite all these advantages, oral reporting can fail and often does. We'll talk about why that is and what you can do to make your oral reporting more effective.
I once taught at a school that had a Provost who could put the whole room to sleep in less than 45 seconds. It was an incredible phenomenon, and I often tried to figure out why he was so intensely boring. I couldn't because I would fall to sleep before I could reach a conclusion.
Seriously, we have all encountered the public speaker withdrawn in his or her little world of notes, speaking inaudably or in monotone, rambling from one idea to another with no apparent undergirding structure, failing to make eye contact, missing opportunity after opportunity to make a satisfactory end to our common misery by closing. And, strangely, these speakers seem to be unaware that they are so boring. You don't want to be one of these people, do you?
The first most common cause of boredom is the speaker's not having come to embody the message he or she wants to give. Until the message is completely internalized, the speaker is simply acting as a conduit for a dead set of information that resides in the notes. Although some actors and news anchors become good at adding voice and facial expression to words even though they don't understand what they are saying, most of us can hope to bring full vibrancy to our expression only when we have become filled with the message and are concentrating on expressing what we have inside instead of trying to figure out what our page of notes is saying. This failure is a failure in the fourth cannon of rhetoric: memory.
The second most deadly cause of boring speech is weak delivery (the fifth cannon of rhetoric). Delivery is the presence you have in front of an audience and it is composed of facial expression, voice, gesture, eye contact, speed of delivery, and perhaps something else. Some people simply don't care about delivery, adopting the attitude that if they want to get it, they can take notes and follow along as I read. Others try to create a vibrant delivery artificially, practicing gestures, trying different tones of expression, concocting artificial enthusiasm. The first person bores us; the second horrifies us. Unless the artificial actor fully masters the illusion (and few of us can) the audience is embarrassed to see the pathetic efforts. Ultimately, its a species of irony: the audience knows something about the speaker that the speaker doesn't know about himself. The solution goes back to the fourth cannon--internalize the information and concentrate on it and on the audience, not on your own performance. Your body, face, and voice will tend to follow along authentically as your try to communicate internalized information to fully present auditors.
Failures of memory and delivery may come from not having time to internalize. It takes time and repetition to bring a message fully to life inside yourself. But sometimes these failures can be traced back to the first two cannons: invention and arrangement. That is, sometimes the message doesn't consist of anything worth saying. It has no news value; it simply repeats what most people know; it remains superficial. People are interested in news, not the same old thing. Sometimes the message may have news, but it is not attached to the common knowledge of the auditor. A basic principle of interest, therefore, is the "given-new contract." This principle states that new information has to be related to existing information, the given. Good information alternates between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Therefore, to do a good job of "inventing" something to say, you need to do research into a subject at a level that makes you a pioneer in relationship to your anticipated audience--you're the explorer or scout who has gone on ahead and is bringing back information they don't have. But good inventing also involves knowing what your adience knows and figuring out ways to make the new information relevant to their knowlege. Finally, the new information needs to point to a specific claim--your thesis. Until you can focus your information well enough to draw one assertion out of it, you have not fully worked through the information. If it turns out your thesis statement is ho-hum, then you know you still haven't found any news.
Even if you get good information, figure out its relevance to your audience, and focus it into a clear and exciting thesis, you still need to shift that information into an audience-centered pattern. Instead of outlining the content of your speech based on your ego-centric world, you need to put yourself in the seat of your auditor and ask, "What would attract my attention; how would I be moved from this bit of knowledge to the next?" Figuring out the psychology of the audience in this way points to a pattern of presentation. One of the obvious things about most auditors is that they like to know where they are in the speech. Information is always contextualized by where it resides. If the speaker previews the speech and gives clear transitional statements, the listener can keep track of where she is in the overall pattern of the speech, and, by the way, the speaker has a much better chance of keeping track too.
What about style, the third cannon of rhetoric? Cardinal Newman said that "Style is the man." He meant that style, or expression, flows naturally from the speaker. I agree. The older you get, the more your vocabulary matures, the greater your powers of drawing analogies and metaphors, the better your facility with complex sentence patterns. These elements of language come with maturity, with extended reading, with a person's ability to conceptualize complex material. I, therefore, think it is important to let your language be natural. Using a thesaurus to come up with fancy words is likely to lead to "malapropism," the miss use of words. Attempting to use complex sentence structures that feel unnatural leads to artificial style at best and shere confusion at worst. This is not to say that you shouldn't work on style: you should. But it should not be your focus of attention while speaking. You can work on your grammar, you can work on accents, you can even plan figures of speech, but during delivery, your expression should be genuinely you.
I want to emphasize once again how important it is in speaking to keep your auditor's attention riveted on you, on your face. You do that by looking directly at them, making eye contact, moving your eye contact around the audience. Don't let something meant to add visual support to your speech get in the way of your one-to-one contact with the audience. Better to have no visual support at all than to play the role of the Wizard of Oz who said to Dorothy, "Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain." Here is an evaluation form for oral reports. Take a look at the categories and the descriptors. These should show you the qualities of a good oral report.
Continue to work on your major project. If you decide to create a speech, send me an email telling me of your change of plans. Read Day on poster sessions for next time.