We discussed gestures and emphasis in today’s class, as a tool for helping listeners both to understand your presentation and to focus their attention on you.
LOOKING FORWARD
For Week 7, you’ll be doing your last presentation before the Midterm Exam. For your Week 7 presentation, please prepare a fairytale. (Sometimes, these are called “folk tales” but it’s the same basic idea.) You’re going to tell the story of a fairytale. You are allowed to choose any story you want (but see below), and are allowed to change or simplify the story (also see below).
As for your fairy tale, here are some guidelines:
- The story should take 4-5 minutes to tell. There are a few times when students have chosen a cool, but over-long story, and then been surprised when it took 10-15 minutes to tell. DON’T DO THIS. It’s better to choose a shorter tale and expand it with more details than to take a long, complex story and try to shorten it.
- Choose a story you think most people won’t know. Do not choose a story that you think people already know. Both Korean folktales and the most famous Grimm Brothers’ fairytales are probably very familiar to the entire class. (I know Nolbu and Heungbu and the tale of Gyeon Woo and Jik Nyeo; you all know about Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood.)
- The exception is if you change the story a lot. For example, once I wrote a play where Nolbu and Heungbu were guys living in Jeonju in the 1970s, and instead of ddokkaebi inside a pumpkin, there were some mafia guys hiding behind a tractor. Another example would be the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears except Goldilocks visits a house with three robots. However, it’s quite a challenge to “retell” a familiar fairytale this way. It’s probably a better choice to just tell a less famous fairytale more straightforwardly.
- It’s especially helpful to choose fairytales or folk stories from “other” cultures. By other, I mean from cultures that don’t include Korea or the various fairytales well-known in the English speaking world. My example fairytale (in a video below) is taken from the writings of the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen; in the past, students have retold fairytales from (for example) Japan, China, Indonesia, France, several indigenous Native American cultures, West Africa, Persia, and Uzbekistan.
- Use your gestures and your voice to make the story easier to understand and more interesting for the audience.
You will need to present this fairy tale in our Week 7 class.
Remember, we talked about how to use your voice and about the types of gestures you can use for better communication. Focus on these areas as you prepare your fairytale (or folk tale).
That’s right, next week you will not be presenting. However, that means you will have two weeks to prepare your fairy tale. Please pick a fairy tale and start preparing it for presentation.
Note: you must tell us the story in the following way:
- from memory. (No scripts, no reading. Remember the story and practice telling it.)
- in your own words. (Don’t memorize a script. Remember the story and use your own vocabulary as much as possible to tell it. One or two words of memorized vocabulary is fine, but you should use your own regular vocabulary for most of the story.)
I hope that’s clear.
LOOKING FORWARD: YOUR MIDTERM EXAM
For your Midterm Exam, you will be using all the speaking techniques and skills we’ve discussed to tell a ghost story. Use your posture, voice, gestures, facial expression, and more to convery the story in an interesting and effective way.
The same rules apply as for the Fairy Tale presentation above: it should be a ghost story you think most people in the class won’t know. It can be from another culture, or it could be a story from your own experience (real or imaginary).
Your ghost story should be between 6–10 minutes long. I will be recording the ghost story on video, for the purposes of sharing with the class afterwards.