English 5250

Fall 2014

Class Presentation Guidelines

Presentations should take 5-7 minutes, which means you should practice in advance and time yourself (because I will). This habit, by the way—practicing before your performance—is standard academic practice at conferences and other venues. And most people read or talk faster in front of an audience than in front of a mirror.

• Five to seven minutes can be a very short time, so one key to a successful presentation will be organization and the proper management of information. You shouldn’t try to tell us every single thing you’ve learned about your subject, but rather what we need to know to be getting on with. A dense account is fine; a breathless enumeration of facts offered in an attempt to be exhaustive is not.

• Five to seven minutes can be a very long time, so one key to a successful presentation will be organization and the proper management of information: not having enough can obviously be as much trouble as having too much. See “Sources” below.

• It’s good to have a beginning, a middle, and an end (and to be able to get to at least the first two)—that is, a preview of what you intend to cover, the body of your report, and a summary. The first might include establishing the relevance of your report to our collective enterprise this semester, or to the week’s reading assignment; the last might include some questions that remain unexplored or that have arisen in the course of your presentation.

• Your presentation should not be boring, and you should devote some time to thinking about why your auditors would be wrong to feel that it is (which will help you revise it so that it’s not).

• You should expect to take one or two questions afterwards, which will typically give you the opportunity to bring up information that you might not have been able to fit into your presentation.

Presentations should either include a handout or a powerpoint presentation (or both).

• I consider the “visual aid” category to be a broad one, which means that outlines and ordered lists are in the same category with images and video/audio clips.

• Potential audio and video clips should be subjected to a strict relevancy test, since they will typically be counted against your time. So no old Emerson, Lake and Palmer tunes, please.

• Non-biodegradable supplements—i.e., electronic files and images—should be prepared sufficiently in advance that we can be sure they’ll work in class (presumably on my laptop). Emailing me something or posting it on MyGateway where I can retrieve it should probably happen on Monday, not Tuesday afternoon.

Sources, properly identified, should be included on the handout or in the powerpoint.

• Obviously we’re looking for more than Wikipedia by way of sources, though you’re welcome to start there for an overview—just don’t tell me. There is a reserve list in the library (which will be growing over the course of the term) that features handbooks and guides to Middle English studies that include many relevant chapters.

• Please consult with me in advance concerning sources; I may be able to provide shortcuts, steer you away from dead ends, and make suggestions. In fact, I hope that you will consult me generally about form, content, organization, etc.—I am a class resource too, as well as being a scary evaluator.

Your reports will be graded only in the judgment, public and private, of those who hear them—a formulation for which I am indebted to Dr. Carroll.