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HOW TO PRESENT YOUR PAPER ORALLY

 

Your career will present you with many opportunities for oral presentations, both formal and informal. At the time they arise, of course, you may not consider them to be “opportunities”. Instead, they may seem to loom on the horizon as stressful obstacles. The purpose of this unit is:

· to compare written manuscript and oral presentation

· to give some guidelines for preparation and delivery of reports

 

8.1. A Comparison: Written versus Oral Report

This unit is based on the principle: Anyone can become a good speaker. Put aside the myth that competent speakers are born with the talent. Certainly some people have more natural talent “at thinking on their feet and have a more resonant voice”, as Pfeiffer (1994) put it, but success at speaking can come to all speakers if they follow the “3Ps” rule:

Rule 1: Prepare carefully

Rule 2: Practice often

Rule 3: Perform with enthusiasm

These simple rules form the foundation of all specific guidelines that follow. Before presenting these guidelines, let us examine some differences of written and oral reports outlined by Michaelson (1990).

First, the reader of the printed page has the freedom to scan the headings and sections, to skip material at will, to proceed at any desired speed, to re-read when necessary, listeners in your audience have no such freedoms. They depend on you and you should remember the special limitations of your listeners. Because of these inherent differences, your written manuscript (which may be entirely appropriate for a conference proceedings or a journal) can fall flat when you attempt to read it to your audience word for word.

The characteristics of the oral paper depend on your voice. Your manner of speaking conveys certain impressions that do not come across in your writing. Voice inflexions (changes in either pitch or loudness) give an added dimension to your paper, providing another way to emphasize the important sections and to subordinate the ideas in others. Your attitude is another parameter of speech that is quickly sensed by the audience. Enthusiasm about your subject is infectious, and lethargy is equally so. Use whatever words you may, you can never hide your own boredom from your listeners.

Still another aspect of the oral presentation is its flexibility. Unlike the written paper, the length and content can be adjusted according to feedback from the audience. When your listeners are shifting uneasily in their chairs, it is time to speed up your presentation. When you see them waiting to catch every word, you know it is time to slow down and perhaps give them more details than you had planned. Be careful, however, to stay within the time slot scheduled for your presentation.

Usually your talk will be shorter than your published paper. This limitation is important: it emphasizes two more differences between oral and written versions. The first is that oral presentations have rather rigid time allocations, especially for papers given in panel sessions at a conference. If you overrun your time slot, you shorten the available for a discussion period. Journal manuscripts are not so limited. The second difference is the attention span of listeners versus that of readers. Your presentation should be short and to the point, illustrated where necessary on the projection screen. The written version, having additional supporting material, tends to be lengthier and to contain more data for future reference.



Publishing a report or journal paper has a special value. It becomes a matter of record; you become known for your work; your professional activity becomes recognized by your colleagues. Presenting a paper orally offers certain additional advantages. It is your opportunity to meet with specialists in your field, to trade notes on newly developed methods and on recent trends, to broaden your horizons. Your presentation is somewhat different from the published paper in the way it contributes to your professional development.

For these reasons, it is worthwhile to plan your oral paper separately, to design it for its special purpose, and to find out beforehand the needs of your audience.


Date: 2016-01-14; view: 915


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