Printed Page 409

Any object can be a visual aid. For example, in a speech about James Bond movies, one student presented a collection of posters depicting all the actors who ever played 007, from Sean Connery to Daniel Craig. By contrast, in a January 2013 presentation, Samsung executive Brian Berkeley spoke about a new OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screen display for tablets and smartphones. Addressing a large audience, Berkeley stood before an immense screen and used it to show important text from his speech, along with graphic illustrations of the new technology. Berkeley also hooked up a wallet-sized prototype to the screen to show that even when he bent the flexible prototype, the images on the giant screen remained unaffected. Given these visuals (and the technology), his audience was entranced.⁴

Of course, Berkeley was speaking to an immense audience and needed projection technology to make his small OLED device accessible to all. If you want to use a small object as a presentation aid in a speech to your classmates, consider walking closer to the audience and holding the object up for them to see.

What if you have the opposite challenge: your object is too large or unwieldy to present in its entirety to your audience? This situation calls for equally creative problem-solving. Consider Alan, a student who once gave a speech about the “physics of bowling.” He explained everything about bowling—including the science behind the holes drilled into the balls, the effect of the rotation and angle of the bowler’s arm on the ball’s momentum, and the ball’s impact on the pins. Naturally, Alan couldn’t bring an entire bowling alley into the classroom, so he came up with an ingenious alternative. He showed his audience three bowling balls—all with different kinds of holes. Then he rolled each of the balls down a slanted table and into the hands of an assistant. As he rolled the balls, he pointed out to his audience how each ball’s speed and path differed based on its design and his technique.