Week 7 Blog

Hello again interested readers. This week saw me continue my work towards editing my paper to be sure that it is ready for the College Board deadline, and this week also saw me begin to work on the meat of my project’s presentation, including the general script for what I would say during the presentation. I also began mentally preparing myself for the presentation, which entailed me reading my draft copy of the script aloud and focusing on my tone of voice, posture, eye contact, etc. to be sure that my presentation would meet the standard of excellence that the College Board expects. With all of these goals in mind, it has been a fairly busy and productive week for my project.

I began my week by looking at my own previous PowerPoint work from seminar and focusing on what strengths and weaknesses my past presentations exposed. One of the first weaknesses that I was able to note down was my tendency to be fairly verbose with the writing in my slides, making it seem more like I was simply reading information from a script rather than actually presenting it to the audience. Another trend that I noticed from my slideshows was that I was often relying on my slides to remember what specific information I had to convey at certain times. I noted that I would have to practice and more thoroughly rehearse my presentation this time around and that I would have to avoid even considering my slides an asset for myself, but rather using them only to help the audience better appreciate my own arguments, discoveries, etc. Finally, another trend that I kept track of was that I frequently would only go into as much detail as my paper would, but I have realized that for this presentation I will want to discuss more confusing sections more thoroughly so that the audience is clear on my reasoning throughout the work.

During this week, I also spent a large portion of the time working on my presentation script and on my speaking skills to make sure I would be able to provide a presentation worthy of the time and effort that I put into the project. I began by writing a general summary of each of the elements of the paper and then allotted time to each section based on its importance to the research being conducted and its difficulty of understanding for the audience. I also tried to connect the summaries into a semi-professional format and began practicing reading them aloud to myself, noting what inflection and tone to use for various points in the presentation and getting used to discussing the material in a nonchalant manner.

This week saw me enter into a new and determined focus on mastering the art of presenting. Whether it was looking back and noting the weaker points of my previous seminar presentations or just getting comfortable with presenting the information to an audience, my work was entirely directed towards making a presentation that I could be proud of.

Regards,

Lazar Vukcevic