See the Additional Resources for Topics for Critical Thinking and Writing and reading comprehension quizzes for this chapter.
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A Debater’s View: Individual Oral Presentations and Debate
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
— JOHN STUART MILL
A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.
— LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of dissension, dissent, and debate.
— HUBERT HUMPHREY
Individual Oral Presentations
Forensic comes from the Latin word foris, meaning “out of doors,” which also produced the word forum, an open space in front of a public building. In the language of rhetoricians, the place where one delivers a speech to an audience is the forum — whether it is a classroom, a court of law, or the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Your instructor may ask you to make an oral presentation (in this case, the forum is the classroom), and if he or she doesn’t make such a demand, later life almost certainly will: You’ll find that at a job interview you will be expected to talk persuasively about what good qualities or experience you can bring to the place of employment. When you have a job, you’ll sometimes have to summarize a report orally or orally argue a case — for instance, that your colleagues should do something they may be hesitant to do.
The goal of your classroom talk is to persuade the audience to share your view, or, if you can’t get them to agree completely, to get them to see that at least there is something to be said for this view — that it is a position a reasonable person can hold.
Elsewhere in this book we have said that the subjects of persuasive writing are usually
matters of fact (e.g., statistics show that the death penalty does — or does not — deter crime), or
matters of value (abortion is — or is not — immoral), or
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matters of policy (government should — or should not — give money to faith-based institutions).
In preparing your oral presentation, keep your thesis in mind. You may be giving counterarguments, examples, definitions, and so forth, but make sure that your thesis is always evident to the audience.
Keep your audience in mind. Inevitably, you will have to make assumptions about what the audience does and does not know about your topic. Do not overestimate their knowledge, and do not underestimate their intelligence.
No matter what your subject is, when you draft and revise your talk, make certain that a thesis statement underlies the whole (e.g., “Proposition 2 is a bad idea because . . .”).
The text of an oral presentation ought not to be identical with the text of a written presentation. Both must have a clear organization, but oral presentations usually require making the organization a bit more obvious, with abundant signposts such as “Before I talk about X,” “When I discussed Y, I didn’t mention such-and-such because I wanted to concentrate on a single instance, but now is the time to consider Y,” and so on. You will also have to repeat a bit more than you would in a written presentation. After all, a reader can turn back to check a sentence or a statistic, but a listener cannot; so rather than saying (as one might in a printed text), “When we think further about Smith’s comment, we realize. . . ,” you’ll repeat what Smith said before you go on to analyze the statement.
You will want to think carefully about the organization of your talk. We’ve already stressed the need to develop essays with clear thesis statements and logical supporting points. Oral presentations are no different, but remember that when you are speaking in public, a clear organization will always help alleviate anxiety and reassure you. Thus, you can deliver a powerful message without getting tripped up yourself. We suggest you try the following:
Outline your draft in advance in order to make sure that it has clear organization.
Inform the audience at the start what the organization of your presentation will be. Early in the talk you probably should say something along these lines, though not in so abbreviated a form:
“In talking about A, I’ll have to define a few terms, B and C, and I will also have to talk about two positions that differ from mine, D and E. I’ll then try to show why A is the best policy to pursue, clearly better than D and E.”
So that the listeners can easily follow you, be sure to use transitions such as “Furthermore,” “Therefore,” “Although it is often said,” and “It may be objected that,” so that the listeners can easily follow your train of thought. Sometimes, you may even remind the listeners what the previous stages were, with such a comment as “We have now seen three approaches to the problem of . . .”
METHODS OF DELIVERY
After thinking about helping the audience to follow your speech, consider how much help you’ll need delivering it. Depending on your comfort level with the topic and your argument, you might decide to
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deliver a memorized talk without notes,
read the talk from a text, or
speak from an outline, perhaps with quotations and statistics written down.
Each of these methods has strengths and weaknesses. A memorized talk allows for plenty of eye contact with the audience but unless you are a superb actor it is almost surely going to seem a bit mechanical. A talk that you read from a text will indeed let you say to an audience exactly what you intend (with the best possible wording), but reading a text inevitably establishes some distance between you and the audience, even if you occasionally glance up from your pages. If you talk from a mere outline, almost surely some of your sentences will turn out to be a bit awkward — though a little awkwardness may help to convey sincerity and therefore be a plus.
No matter what form of delivery you choose, try to convey the impression that you’re conversing with the audience, not talking down to them — even though if you’re standing on a platform you will be literally talking down.
You may want to use audiovisual aids in your presentation. These can range from such low-tech materials as handouts, blackboards, and whiteboards to high-tech PowerPoint presentations. Each has advantages and disadvantages. For instance, if you distribute handouts when the talk begins, the audience may start thumbing through them during your opening comments. And although PowerPoint can be a highly useful aid, some speakers make too much use of it simply because it’s available. It happens that the day before writing this discussion the author witnessed a PowerPoint presentation that began with the speaker projecting on the screen the date, the speaker’s name, and the name of the university at which the talk was being delivered. Well, most of us knew the date, and we all knew the speaker’s name and the name of the university. It seemed like overkill. The truth is, the talk simply didn’t need any images at all, and we ended up wondering why the speaker bothered with PowerPoint.
For a delightful parody of this sort of talk, consider “The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation” (http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/). It begins thus:
And now please welcome President Abraham Lincoln.
Good morning. Just a second while I get this connection to work. Do I press this button here? Function-F7? No, that’s not right. Hmmm. Maybe I’ll have to reboot. Hold on a minute. Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I’m your president. While we’re waiting, I want to thank Judge David Wills, chairman of the committee supervising the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. It’s great to be here, Dave, and you and the committee are doing a great job. Gee, sometimes this new technology does have glitches, but we couldn’t live without it, could we? Oh — is it ready? OK, here we go.
The lesson? Yes, use audiovisual material if it will help you to present your material, but don’t use it if it adds nothing or if you haven’t mastered the technology.
One final point: If you do use visual material, make certain that any words on the images are large enough to be legible to the audience: A graph with tiny words won’t impress your audience, even if you read the words aloud.