Hi everyone,
Today, we met and you did your first presentation, a short self-introduction. I asked you about your feelings about each presentation, and gave you some feedback about them.
We talked about one common weakness shared by several of you: that you didn’t all project confidence while speaking. We talked about elements of confidence such as eye contact, posture, and smiling.
I then did a couple of examples of the next presentation I’m asking you to prepare for our class. (See below.)
Your Next Presentation: An Embarrassing Story
Please prepare a presentation in which you will do the following things at the same time:
- To tell a story about a personal experience that you find embarrassing to tell people. (Sometime students misunderstand what I mean, and tell a “stressful” story. To be clear: I mean a story where you did a very stupid or foolish thing—where you made a big mistake, or where you did something ridiculous and created a big problem.)
- To make the presentation in a way that makes people feel you are confident instead of embarrassed or nervous. Of course the story is embarrassing, but everyone listening should feel like you are remaining surprisingly, impressively confident while you tell the story.
Please also follow the guidelines below for this presentation:
- It should be ~5 minutes in length. (It definitely should not be much longer than five minutes, and must not be shorter than four minutes. Time yourself while you practice, and aim for 4–4.5 minutes as the best length.)
- It should be interesting! Pick a story you think the audience will enjoy hearing!
- It should include the story of a real experience you had which was very embarrassing for you. (Don’t make up a fake story.)
- It should include classroom-appropriate content. Therefore, please choose a story that does not include any of the following:
- Illegal activities
- “Adult” (18+/sexual) incidents
- Disgusting things (such as bathroom stuff)
- Avoid “I got so drunk that I…” stories: they’re usually not very interesting or funny.
- You should not use a script. You can write a script as a first step in preparing, but please practice telling the story in English, instead of using a script. (We’ll talk more about how to prepare a presentation without a script later. For now, feel free to write something, but please then throw the script away and prepare for the presentation by using or memorizing the notes and telling the story (many times) in a spontaneous way.
We will begin giving (and seeing) these presentations in class in Week 3.