Oral Presentations

For your oral presentation, you will need to give a 20 minute presentation on the subject of your major research project. You might choose to do it in several ways:

• Deliver your paper "conference style" as you would at a professional meeting or research seminar, then take questions following it.
• Give a multimedia presentation about your subject and argument, not reading the paper but basically taking us through the territory.
• Teach a mini-lesson from your work or talk about how it will fit into your teaching.

These are just ideas; the rest is up to you. Your goal is to provoke some discussion of your ideas and to inspire questions and feedback from your peers. This presentation counts as one-third of your class participation grade.

Naturally, since we will be reacting as _listeners_ to your work, you want to consider how you adapt your subject for oral delivery, pace it for time control and intelligibility, and consider carefully what (if any) multimedia support you will use. You'll be standing up in front of the class (or sitting at the computer terminal), so you'll need to make eye contact with your listeners and engage our interest.

Some resources of use are on the English Majors' Handbook webpage: The Snappy Guide to Giving a Conference Paper and The Guide for the Conferentially Perplexed.