Feb26 Summary(C7 Designing Oral Presentations)

Chapter 7 explores how to overcome speech anxiety and strategies to design effective presentations.

How can you reduce speech anxiety and how to design effective presentations? First of all, select a topic based on your interests, your skills, or current events. Informative, persuasive, requesting, and entertaining are four speech goal intentions. Secondly, analyze your audience to customize your presentation to meet their information, point of view, and background needs.
And the most important, a speech should have an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. The introduction should preview the main idea; establish your credibility; get the audience’s attention; and make a connection among you, the audience, and the occasion. The body of speech should describe, explain, or demonstrate the main ideas through supportive secondary ideas. The conclusion should summarize and connect main points, provide future direction, and close in a meaningful and memorable way.
Every speech must have a general and a specific purpose. A general purpose is to inform, to persuade, to entertain or to inspire. A specific purpose is what you want the audience to do after listening to your speech. Once you have established your general and specific purposes, you’ll find it easy to organize your speech. You’ll also have more confidence, which makes you more convincing, enthusiastic and sincere. Of course, the better organized the speech is, the more likely it is to achieve your purpose.
Good speech organization is essential if our audience is to follow and understand your presentation. You must take the time to put your ideas together in an orderly manner. You can organize your speech in several different ways; choose the outline that best suits your topic. The opening should catch the audience’s attention, the body must support the idea you want to convey, and the conclusion should reinforce your ideas and be memorable. Transitions between thoughts should be smooth.