Last week I presented in Principia College\u2019s Dilemmas and Decisions program. It involved a speech. The thing is, while I give others feedback on speeches, this format for expressing ideas is not my forte. I\u2019m a writer. I\u2019m not a natural presenter. Sure, I\u2019m a professor, but somehow that\u2019s different to me. Since I really wanted to participate and share on my assigned topic, reason, when asked a few semesters ago, I agreed to present.<\/p>\n
Two things were key to my success and confidence this time around, and I want to share both here as pointers in case they help you.<\/p>\n
#1 Make it your own<\/strong><\/p>\n For three semesters I worked with a script that had been written by someone else. Sure, I added some ideas, including a story last fall, but the script and ideas were never really mine. This got in the way of my confidence and, I think, the success of the presentation. I was never comfortable. This semester I realized I could change that.<\/p>\n In talking through with my husband what the students, mostly college juniors, would care to know about reason and reasoning, I came up with five stories of decisions I\u2019d made between the ages of 17 and 25 and how I had reasoned through them. I started to get excited about giving the talk (and remember, I really don\u2019t like giving presentations to big groups). Why was I excited? I had made it my own, just as I advise my students to do. (You see, they almost always claim that they can\u2019t write about things they\u2019re not passionate about. For me, the passion came in my eagerness to share these stories.)<\/p>\n #2 Do a reverse outline<\/strong> \u201cPut it in reverse\u201d <\/a>and \u201cReverse outlines to get you to the finish line\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n So I wrote my stories. I crafted an introduction that directly addressed reason as a concept. My conclusion even expressed directly how my last story related to the framework in which reason had been presented to the students: You know, \u201cHere\u2019s how my last story proves my point\u2026.\u201d That kind of thing.<\/p>\n But I still wasn\u2019t sure the stories were holding together. I wanted each story to demonstrate a specific point. A-ha! I needed to do a reverse outline, to make sure the speech was doing what I wanted it to. So I took a piece of paper and began. I wrote down the key ideas in the introduction. Then I numbered each story: #1 college choice, #2 grad school choice, #3 should I get engaged?, #4 should I get married?, and #5 should I move to another state? Then I mapped each one to plot which personal values each story represented.<\/p>\n It was only AFTER I\u2019d done this mapping that I saw that mostly <\/em>I was doing what I had intended. Everything pointed at least somewhat<\/em> to the fact that reasoning based on our personal values (as opposed to outside influences) leads to \u201cfreedom,\u201d and that was my point. But the reverse outline showed me a few gaps, a few connections on the map that weren\u2019t quite being made. And it annoyed me that I hadn\u2019t thought to do a reverse outline earlier. Darn it. I teach this stuff! So, I\u2019m here to remind you to practice what you preach.<\/p>\n The next time I\u2019ll do the reverse outline when I have more than an hour to spare before the talk. A bonus for this time though: the reverse outline helped free me from my script (I didn\u2019t have to read the whole thing), and it helped me know that the points were there. Next time, they\u2019ll be crafted to be crystal clear for my audience. I think they\u2019ll like that.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ellen Sprague is a writing specialist and assistant professor in the Center for Teaching and Learning. Two (of many) favorite teaching gigs are ENGL 239: Intro to Creative Nonfiction and WLIT 131: Stories around the Globe, which will be taught on the 2019 Slovenia\/Croatia\/Bosnia Abroad.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week I presented in Principia College\u2019s Dilemmas and Decisions program. It involved a speech. The thing is, while I give others […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching-tips"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5DI6r-E7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2487"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2488,"href":"http:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487\/revisions\/2488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}