 Hello and welcome to the lecture for chapter 10, Planning, Organizing and Presenting Small Group Oral Presentations. Over the next several slides, we'll talk about the steps that cover the planning stage, the organizing stage, and the presenting stage of group presentations, as well as some important tips on the things that you should do to make sure that your delivery is effective and excellent during your presentation. All right, so first off, before we can really dive into our understanding here, it's helpful to talk about some of the different types of presentations. While there are probably a whole list of nuance topics that we could cover, in this course, there are a couple key types of presentations that we really focus on. First is that of informative presentations. The goal of an informative presentation is to teach your audience about a topic that they don't know very much about. And so in searching for informative topics, you tend to look at things where you can bring insights and understandings on a new topic. That said, what separates informative presentations from other presentations is a tendency to lack persuasive appeals. There aren't very many calls to action inside of them. You're really here just to inform people about a topic and not change their mind about anything. This can be contrasted with a persuasive presentation that while still informs individual about a topic, actually calls the audience to action. Typically in a persuasive presentation, there's a discussion of problems, causes of those problems, and then a presentation of a solution that the audience should try to do something to make happen. Separate from these two, but also inclusive, is entertainment presentations that amuse the audience while still accomplishing one of the goals of either being informative or persuasive. It can go either way inside of that. All right, so let's talk a little bit about the steps that you would take to effectively create and put together a presentation. The first stage of a presentation is what we call the planning stage. And this is all of the groundwork that comes together before you actually start putting together the presentation. So in this initial stage, you start by figuring out who your audience is by conducting an audience analysis. By understanding your audience, you can better craft a message that will be effective and meet their needs. You also wanna research the occasion. What occasion are you asked to be speak at, right? Is this a business meeting? Is this a celebration or an award ceremony? Is this a specific event relative to a community organization? What is it? By understanding the occasion, you can more carefully adapt your message to fit inside of that. From there, you start, want to start understanding and doing some research on the purpose of the presentation, the subject and topic that you're being asked to speak about. And then from there, you can move on and assess the group members. You should assess their skills, their abilities, their strengths and their weaknesses to figure out how to best utilize individuals with the task that is coming before you. And finally, as you prepare to actually get the real work done, you're going to determine the logistics and any supplies that you might need to be able to accomplish the creation of a good presentation. Once you've done that, you're able to move on to the actual organizing stage. During the organizing stage, what you're trying to do is put everything together so that you are situated to give an excellent presentation. During the stage, you and your group members will gather both verbal and visual materials for the presentation. This includes all of the research that you need and creating an outline and the materials that you'll have to do inside of this. A note about the outline, an outline is not meant to be a manuscript. And while there are different types of presentations, outlines allow for a extemporaneous style of delivery. And so what you would want to do is create a full sentence outline that contains in-text parenthetical citations like the one seen in this visual aid that allows you to cite where your information is coming from. It's important to take note during the organizational stage that by correctly citing the information, you will save yourself that hassle when it comes time to present, but also will allow you to be ethical and effective in presenting information because not citing information is really the same as plagiarizing other people's ideas. When it's time to present, there's a couple of things to keep in mind when you find yourself in front of other individuals. First off, the use of language is the main way your audience will understand your message. So you want to make sure that the things that you are saying are clear but vivid and appropriate to the situation and setting for which you're giving your presentation. There's a lot of different ways that presentations can be given. Some include manuscript presentations where you're reading off a script. Others are memorized where you've written a manuscript and then memorized that. Some are impromptu where you just jot down a couple of notes right before you speak. But in this course, the types of presentations you will be giving are extemporaneous where you have done in-depth preparation but not at the level of writing a script. You've created solid notes that you are then going to extemporaneously deliver a presentation. That said, regardless of the delivery style, you want to practice out loud a lot before you actually attempt to go in front of your final audience. All right, now that we understand some of the basics that go into putting a presentation together, let's talk a little bit about what goes into good delivery. There are several factors and I'm going to cover them in order so you have an idea of what you want to do as well as what you don't want to do. So one of the most important things that you can do as a speaker when you're in front of the audience is maintain good and consistent eye contact. This means that if you ever had as teacher or someone tell you the best way to give a speech is just to look at a point in the back of the room, you need to forget that right now. Eye contact is the key way that you make connection with your audience while you speak and that they can feel invested with you and the message you're breathing from them. So you want to make sure that you're looking at people in the eye and that you're scanning the room and making eye contact with a variety of people. This means that you need to avoid looking at your notes. Some of the worst presentations are the ones where people just read directly off notes or read directly off a manuscript. 90% of your presentation or more should involve you looking and making eye contact with your audience. One of the things that you should try to do is as you move around the room, shift your focus. Look at different parts of the room. Don't try to ignore a part of the room. If there's people that are kind of off to the side, make an effort to look at them so that they feel connected and invested inside your message. The next one is to use movement effectively during your presentation. So when speaking, particularly during a group presentation, you want to let the main speaker have the floor. This means never ever should the entire group stand in front of the room in a row and just kind of talk in order. Whoever the speaker is, let them have the stage. Everyone else should move off to the side so that they can go ahead and focus on the audience and make some connection. While you're in front of the room, you want to use movement on the stage to help illustrate movement between main points. So if you're part of the presentation involves explaining two issues, you might start off at the left side of the room on the left of the screen, explain your first issue, and then as you get ready to explain your second issue, transition, moving from the first point to the next point and walk to the other side of the screen. What this does for your audience not only has some useful movement inside of it, but also illustrates physically that you're moving from one point to the next point of your presentation. What you do not want to do under any circumstances is pace back and forth in the front of the room during your presentation or sway from side to side like Hillary's doing here or rock back and forth or do the simulation where it feels like you're on a ship at sea. All of those things become distracting from your message and ultimately hurt your ability to convey a message to an audience. The next thing that you want to worry about during your presentation is the effective use of gestures. During a presentation, you want to continue the gesture throughout the speech, but the gestures should make sense. You don't just want to have your hands flying in circles around your forehead and all over the place because that's going to be distracting. You want to use appropriate gestures that match what you're saying inside of that. That means you got to be natural and as you see down here at the bottom, if you struggle with this, you know, do a little participant observation of how you and your friends talk when not in front of a class. Another thing to be careful of is the T-Rex arms. This is the tendency for people to glue their elbows to the side of their body and talk in tiny little gestures that are only a couple inches away from each other. Not only does this look a little awkward, they've actually done research of speakers and speakers that have big open gestures are always considered more trustworthy than people that are more closed off. On this note, if you're going to have notes, you want to keep those note cards in a single hand. Holding note cards in both hands prevents you from gesturing, tends to be a distraction and encourages people to read directly off the notes. Instead, put the note cards in one hand, palm them in that hand, and then continue to gesture with them. As a side note to make it easier, never ever ever use note cards that are bigger than three by five cards. And I shouldn't have to say it, but I will never bring full eight and a half by 11 sheets of paper to the front of the room. Not only will this be an ineffective way, they tend to crinkle and make noise and ultimately, again, are more distracting than they are to enhance the message. So make sure that you don't do that. In general, if there's a point during your presentation where you don't need to gesture for a second, just let those arms fall to your side and that's what you should do with your hands. Okay, vocal variety. It's important to kind of focus on three things when it comes to the perilinguistics of your voice during your presentation. First is to have good volume. Consider the size of the room. It's a very small room. You may not have to be as loud as you do if it's a very large room. Always take a chance to scout out the place that you are speaking before you do so so you have an idea of how loud you need to be to fill that room. The next thing is to keep a steady pace. Try not to kind of draw off and to slow and then really speed up as you talk out of things and draw off into other things. Kind of keep things moving at a nice steady pace, perhaps accelerating if you're building up to something suspenseful like in a story. Last but not least, use vocal variety and appropriate tone inside your message. What this means is that you should be engaged and interested and excited about what you have to say. And if you're talking about something that is really depressing, by all means, don't feel afraid to show you some emotion. What you should avoid doing, however, is being Ben Stein. Ben Stein was a kind of famous individual in the 80s and the 90s and used to do the Clear Eyes commercials and is infamously known for having an incredibly monotone voice, meaning that he speaks at the same rate of speech, never varying his voice up or down as he goes throughout this. And it tends to just be really boring. You wanna mix it up inside of there as you move throughout your presentation. That leads us to language. When giving a formal presentation, we try to step things up a little bit. First off, if you're discussing a topic that you don't know a lot about, particularly if it's an academic topic, which includes some complex ideas, it's a good idea to have any of those terms that you don't understand, explain to you. If you've never heard this word before, ask someone else to help you explain it or look online. There's a lot of websites that offer pronunciation services. Word choice, these presentations are your chance to use all of those really fancy $5 college words. So impress us with the verboseness of your lexicon during your presentation. And otherwise, feel free to use all those big words. Well, you should avoid our slang, so those slang terms don't be dropping yolos and whatnot in the midst of a presentation. And last but not least, do your best to avoid verbal fillers. Verbal fillers are the ums, likes, you know, and all of those different words and sounds that come in place. The best thing that I can recommend doing is if you feel like you're going to say a verbal filler, like whatnot, instead of doing that, pause for a second, collect yourself in that second, and move on. It's way less noticeable than actually saying the verbal filler. Last but not least is appearance. What you really want to understand from this is that having better attire and looking fancier can first off enhance the credibility to your audience, but also can enhance your confidence. At the very least, you know, it may not always be necessary to wear a full 3D piece suit, but you know, don't be lazy, tuck in your shirts, iron your clothes, and do those types of things so that you're kind of presenting yourself in the best possible light. All right, and that brings us to the end. Once again, thank you for watching. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at one of the variety of methods that are available to you.