Fundamentals of Informative Presentations

So, I've been pretty busy the past nine months or so teaching an overload section of my course, Professional Communication and Presentation. This has left me very little time to work on some much needed tweaks and revisions to my online class.

The first empty/taskless moment I found during this my first month with only two sections (one of which has six students), I started working on a series of podcast/videos on informative speaking using Cicero's Five Canons of Rhetoric: Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, and Delivery.

This series was mostly prompted by an on going and recent frustration of mine. This frustration is with what appears to be a lack of clarity between what it means to inform objectively and persuade. I ask my students during their first week in the online class to develop a plan for an informative podcast of at most four minutes. The plan is a chance for them to ask me direct questions and to answer some important questions about their purpose, audience, subject, and selves. What I have realized after receiving topics ranging from informing the audience of how wrong this is, or how this other thing needs to stop, or how the audience needs to start doing blank about blank problem, I realized that people really didn't understand the difference between informing and persuading. I know everything is an argument, and that even an informative speech is still persuading the audience to view information in a particular way, I never expected topics like these. I expected how to tune a guitar, who invented the telephone, how to record a song using GarageBand, the history of cheese....is there really no difference between these terms? I developed these videos in part to help me figure out that question.

Fundamentals of Informative Presentations, Part One



This first video covers Preparation and Invention. After reading Garr Reynolds' first few chapters of The Naked Presenter, I plan on amending the audio to include his ideas, which are super awesome!


Fundamentals of Informative Presentations, Part Two



This is the one I want my students to really pay the most attention to. I include examples of informative vs. persuasive topics using chopsticks, The Beatles, termites, dolphins, and ocean dumping.

Fundamentals of Informative Presentations, Part Three



Here's my two cents on arranging the intro, body, and conclusion of a presentation. Don't forget a strong hook and a S.T.A.R. moment!


Fundamentals of Informative Presentations, Part Four



I had to break up Style and Memory into two shorter videos because style is such an expansive topic, and I wanted to get both into concrete language and metaphors.

Fundamentals of Informative Presentations, Part Five



Finally, part five breaks down metaphors and concrete language. It includes a shout out to one of my faves, aphorist James Geary.