Face it, at some point we are all going to have to do an oral presentation in class for a grade. Anxious? Take a deep breath, don’t panic, and remember you can do it. You may not have a silver tongue, but that doesn’t mean you can’t communicate effectively.
Classroom presentations can be frightening, but think of them as opportunities to share your thoughts about a particular subject with your peers and friends. You already do this informally in the classroom during discussions, study groups, or just with your friends in the dorm. Giving an oral presentation or speech is fundamentally no different than that, except that you get to control the setting and process for delivering your ideas.
The idea of an oral presentation is to determine how well you grasp a specific topic and can communicate it to others. This is not as hard as you might think. Most people get panicky over this because they are scared of the unknown, but the power in a speech is this: you control how you will communicate the topic to others. So stick to what you know and have researched, and remember — if you know it and believe it then others will connect and believe it with you.
First, take some time to brainstorm about your topic. What are the different perspectives relating to it? What about arguments, both pro and con? List these out on paper, and don’t rule anything out just yet.
After your brainstorming session, start organizing your thoughts into a thesis statement and three or four supporting statements, in outline form. Be sure to stick to three or four statements – one of the most common mistakes in public speaking is presenting more information than you need (overselling your ideas) or than the audience cares to hear. By going with three or four supporting statements, we have a basic speech outline ready for some supporting research.
Great, we have an outline. So what do we do now?
Click