Oral Presentation Reflection

Before class started on Monday, Brad told us an amusing story about the Great Wall of China. Essentially, despite the construction of such a majestic fortress, the Mongols still managed to invade China due to the fault of a corrupt guard. What I took away from this short story was the fact that things don’t always turn out the way you plan. Little did I know that the moral of this little story would be an eerily accurate foreshadowing of my presentation that afternoon! 

I met with my group mates Kristyn and Joel twice on the weekend before the presentation. We edited the slides and practiced the entire presentation many times. By the time we wrapped things up on Sunday afternoon, I felt rather confident that we would do a good job on Monday. Our slides looked good and I felt certain that I would be able to deliver a good presentation as I had memorized my lines to the letter. 

Sadly, when it came time for me to speak on Monday, I was so fixated on reciting my lines in verbatim that I forgot all the important non-verbal cues. My stance was too tense and rigid, I made minimal eye-contact with my audience and I spoke way too fast. Brad and my classmates also commented that I looked at the screen too much and I think this was due to the fact that I was standing askew when I should have been facing the audience.

I think my poor presentation can be attributed primarily to the fact that I memorized my script. Because I felt that a large percentage of my grade was riding on this presentation, I wanted everything to be perfect. Unfortunately, memorizing my lines robbed my presentation of any natural human emotion. 

For me, the biggest lesson I can learn from this incident is that I should rely more on my spontaneity when giving a presentation. Memorizing my lines makes me feel nervous and jittery, and I end up droning on and on like an automaton (hey, that rhymes!). I think I would have done a much better job had I been more confident in my ability to speak comfortably in front of an audience and not be so fixated on getting the words in perfect order. 

Apart from that, I thought our slides were clean-looking and easy to follow. However some of my classmates commented that the screenshots made the slides look very wordy. Brad said that we should have blacked out the screen after flashing the slides in order to draw attention to ourselves (the speakers). This is an interesting suggestion and I think it’s very helpful for presentations like ours where the images are screenshots of words. All in all however, I personally felt the slides were good!

Thank you everyone for your constructive feedback regarding my presentation skills! 

Thank you Kristyn and Joel for being such great group mates! The project did seem overwhelming at times, but all in all I think we did pretty okay!