Make The Audience Work For It

How important is information that is spoon-fed to us as if we, the audience, are children? When you are sitting down and watching a presenter speak with a Powerpoint behind him that’s saying the same things that he’s saying, why bother? Think of all the time that could be saved by printing out those slides and reading them while you are doing something much more important with your life.

Here is the problem.

Presenters must treat their presentations like their own worlds. When the presentation starts, the audience must feel that whatever is being told to them right now has an importance and a purpose that will not be wasted by wandering minds and poor attention. A good presenter can make the problem of the rising prices of video games as urgent as world war. A presenter is nothing short of a salesman. Instead of giving you a pamphlet about how well the vacuum works, they throw dirt on a carpet and vacuum it up in seconds. In chapter 7, Garr shows you how to throw dirt and not give the audience a bib and a spoon.

I would say the two best things to take away from Chapter 7 are the use of symbolism and lack of bulleted points. If you are presenting to me and saying the same things your slides say, I feel as if I’m at a book reading. Symbols, metaphors…these things jump out and grab the audience and establish meaning in an interesting way. Garr has a slide with  just a picture of empty hands, and if you weren’t there for the presentation, you would have no idea why the hands were there or what meaning they were supposed to convey. You would be forced to listen and take in the presenter’s words. These are presentations that stick with people long after they’ve had lunch and left the office.

Pre-Zen-tation Design

I have always been taught to analyze everything from an outside point-of-view. In any situation or event, I am expected to zoom out and create an assessment from this viewpoint of an onlooker. Whenever I am the audience for a presentation that involves Microsoft Powerpoint, I sit back deep into my chair as if to brace myself for a tornado of useless, uninteresting material that is even further trivialized by gratuitous images, sounds, and color combinations. Even in a professional setting, I have seen some of the most poorly designed presentations that I thought possible. Last weekend I sat in the campus computer lab in the Link building right next to a girl who was designing a presentation for one of her classes. She had no less than 20 slides that were so filled with words that she was creating slides that were titled what the previous slide was titled followed by ”cont’d”, standing for continued.

If you ask me, a presentation is not supposed to look like a visual textbook, and Garr Reynolds recognizes that. In chapter 6, Reynolds teaches a few general guidelines for effective presentations that may seem like common sense, however if they were truly common sense, you would see effective presentations more commonly. Garr Reynolds emphasis on simplicity may be the single most important issue that separates the intriguing presentations from the dry, boring ones. Why have a slide with 300 words on it when it can be simplified to 10? Haven’t you ever had a conversation that you almost slept through because the person turned a five minute story into a full-length feature film? Simplicity is the umbrella that Reynolds uses to shield us, future presenters, from inclement boredom and apathy.

R.I.P PowerPoint

It is unlikely that such a hypervisible program such as Powerpoint would be challenged. Doesn’t every successful businessperson or master presenter use it? In my Presentations class this semester, I am being taught these very specific PowerPoint tips; I am supposed to use three to four bulleted points a slide, use catchy titles to grip the viewer’s attention, and to spend at least 30 seconds to a minute a slide. Garr Reynolds wouldn’t agree with that. In fact, he would probably have my teacher engage in a meditative excersize, freeing his mind from pre-existing rules and regulations. Who is right, Garr Reynolds or my IST professor? To arrive at a conclusion, I decided to make my own assessment by a comparison of the two contrasting ideas.

To discover which approach is a more effective one, I must first decide what makes a presentation effective? I must say that sitting through a class and staring at blocky, bulleted points that make mute points doesn’t exactly grab my attention as an audience member. As entertaining as my teacher attempts to make old, basic, methods of presentation, the sheer thought of sitting in a business room and boring my superiors half to death makes me cringe more than nails on a blackboard. Presentation Zen, on the other hand, offers a fresh new interpretation of the science of presenting. In the first two chapters, Reynolds breaks the stereotype of the dull, remedial PowerPoints that have Times New Roman twelve-point font and complete sentences for slides. If you can read the slides by themselves and get the point without the presenter speaking at all, the PowerPoint is useless.

Pepperdine Fact Sheet

Pepperdine University

Mission
The Graduate School of Education and Psychology (GSEP) has a dual educational mission, being dedicated to training skilled leaders, administrators, and practitioners of the highest level within two allied fields of human care: education and psychology.

Program Benefits
* Personalized curriculum to meet individual needs
* Nationally recognized
* Three campuses in West Los Angeles, Encino and Irvine
* Students complete an Action Research Project rather than a thesis
* Program can be completed in one or two years, depending on the student
* Smaller, more intimate class sizes
* Choose a designated emphasis that suits your interests

Cost
M.A. in Education and Teaching Credential: 1 year/2 year – 41,830
There is a variety of grants and loans available for graduate students enrolled at GSEP.
In addition, GSEP graduates who earn a Teaching Credential and teach for a specified number of years in designated low income, low performing and/or qualifying subject areas may be eligible for loan forgiveness (a portion of federal loans would be forgiven and would not have to be repaid).

Housing
On-campus housing is available at the campus in beautiful Malibu, California. Some of the worlds most famous companies, businesses, restaurants, and tourist spots are in the surrounding areas.

Career Services

* Career counseling and assessment
* Cover letter, resume, and curriculum vitae writing assistance
* Job search assistance
* Interview preparation
* Career workshops and special events
* Employment listings

Who to hire?

Resumes are essentially self-advertisements for career positions. Whoever presents the best or most appealing advertisement gets the job. Before my statements can be perceived as oversimplifying the complexities of resume construction, I will comment that while resumes may seem simple, the slightest mistakes can leave a job candidate to a “don’t call us, we’ll call you” situation. Those aren’t so favorable.

Working hard is different than working smart. Writing in a resume that you were a cheerleader, head of the Chess club, lead singer in the Glee club, head number adder-upper in the Math club, and lead tapper on the Tap Dance squad all at the same time does not necessarily mean that you are a hard-worker. It could mean that you were part of so many different things that you couldn’t focus on one thing at a time. Also, always keep it relevant. If you are applying for a job in fashion, writing one of your hobbies as basketball may not give you the edge over John Doe or Suzy Q. Now here is where it gets a little tricky – grades. If you list your grades in high school – say you get about a 3.7 – and do not list your grades in college (a staggering 2.4), the reader of the resume may safely assume that your grades in college were too unfavorable to list. If your grades reflect favorably, list them. If not, listing them may not work in your favor.

My favorite part of a resume is work experience – the bread and butter of any resume. In this part of the resume, the writer shows off his or her skills by displaying prior experience in the field (hopefully). Long-winded sentences about how you worked in a department store and were responsible for giving the customer the right number when they were trying on clothes in the dressing room is not effective in a resume. A resume is a perfect situation to tell somebody what they want to hear without going overboard. For example, what looks better to you – garbage man or sanitation engineer?

With that said, I read over the two sample resumes in chapter 10 in Gurak/Lannon and decided that if I had to hire one of the two candidates, I would hire Lisa Sample. Lisa’s resume accurately describes why a boss would want to hire her as a Clinical Dietician. Her grades were favorable and relevant to her career objective, and her work experience is detailed without being too long. Even her graduate activities were closely related to her craft. Nadine Wolf’s resume was wordy, disinteresting, and irrelevant. It seemed like she was trying to use experience at a summer camp as a reason why she should be hired for a job in conservation promotion. Managing third graders and teaching summer programs is not enough experience to be an Environmental Educator.

Lost and In Search…of a Job that is.

Like a toddler in the grocery store of life, I am lost without my proverbial “mommy” to guide me in terms of a career. I am Syracuse University’s lab rat generation of Writing majors and there is no clear-cut future for me and my cheese-eating comrades. Biology majors have their specific science fields and Whitman students have supply-chain and finance and other avenues, but what does the future hold for the warrior who uses his pen (or keyboard) as his weapon of attack?

I can express at least that I will undoubtedly not be meeting ladies at formal events and telling them that I write technical guides for HP printers. “Yeah so has your printer ever run out of ink and you didn’t know what the red light meant, so you went to the manual and fixed it? Yeah, I wrote that.” And just the thought of living the Office Space lifestyle makes me comtemplate committing careericide.

For this project, I expect to be the example for the next generations of Syracuse Writing majors by becoming the kid that applied to a dream job in his Professional Writing class and ended up writing for a company that pays him unethically high amounts of money to do what he loves.

Social Entrepreneurship

In discovering what social entrepreneurship meant to me, I began by breaking down the two terms. Entrepreneurship is a term that is generally associated with material wealth, prosperity, and monetary gain at considerable risk. If this is true, than what is “social entrepreneurship”? The term social is used to describe a society, a group of people connected by location, government, mutual interests, culture, etc. By combining the two terms, I came up with a definition that seems to accurately describe this idea.

Social Entrepreneurship is the idea of creating progress, prosperity, and growth within a community. Unlike charity, social entrepreneurship seeks change for the better on a grand scale. Donations to a local orphanage is certainly helpful, however creating more job opportunities for youth and fostering individual strength and family values within the town is a more effective wide-scale reformation.

While reading the New York Times, I read an article that stated, “Making money while doing good is not easy”. Due to the context of the article, it is obvious that by “doing good” they were referring to a certain moral obligation, the same moral obligation that drives social entrepreneurship. Although, in the example of the United States, a capitalist society is one driven by money and the pursuit of products or services, it is a problem that business are more concerned with the green in the pocket instead of green energy.

Presentations

Inside Chapter 10, I found a wealth of information about oral presentation, Microsoft PowerPoint usage, and audience and purpose analysis, however the amount of useless material greatly overwhelmed the amount of information necessary or appropriate to deliver a great oral presentation. Firstly, there were some patches of valuable ideas worth mentioning. Toward the beginning of the chapter, Laura Gurak and John M. Lannon state “A person’s role in the organization will affect how he or she listens to your topic” (215). They go on to describe that depending on the audience’s position in the company, certain aspects of the presentation may or may not be important to them. This is truly something that a presenter would have the advantage to know. It may seem to be common knowledge, but I have been the audience for many oral presentations in which I did not feel that the presenter accurately took in consideration the biases of his or her audience. Knowing that your audience is a group of busy store managers and wrapping them up in a two-hour presentation is clearly not effective, regardless of how useful the material is or how effective the presentation is delivered.

With the exception of a few small points here and there, this chapter was inundated with tips and hints that were either irrelevant or abstract or were simply common sense. For example, a few pages within the chapter were dedication to explaining that informative presentations are presentations that are informative, training sessions are sessions that provided training, persuasive presentations are presentations that use persuasion, and so on. Later in the chapter, tips about using PowerPoint were supported by a confusing and seemingly irrelevant anecdote about an accident in NASA. The PowerPoint presentation of the errors in a vessel were said to have caused more damage because it was unclear in the slides. If clearly the engineers were aiming to hide some information, it doesn’t matter in the presentation was on PowerPoint or on paper, whatever information they intended to cover up would still be lost in translation.

Gurak/Lannon – Chapter Two

Before reading the chapter, I was very uninformed about technical writing and its purposes. Chapter Two in Gurak/Lannon definetly served its purpose in explaining to me the importance of technical writing and its practical purposes. Since the chapter is entitled “A World of People and Purposes”, the chapter manages not to fall short of what it intends to teach to its audience. Although the chapter may seem fairly basic, it touches on many concepts that may not be common sense. If Gurak and Lannon had expressed their ideas in a deeper and more complex manner, they may have compromised clarity and possibly relevance.

The most important part of Chapter Two for me was the concept of audience awareness and relevance. Too often do I read the flyers on the tables in the dining halls or watch commercials that do not seem to be very aware of who they are speaking to and why. A huge reason why people become disinterested in products of technical writing is because they feel that the writers are not speaking to them. A campus flyer about sexual harassment needs to express to me why sexual harassment is a problem for students or else I will dismiss it because I don’t sense its relevancy. Knowing who you are trying to reach out to is an essential part of effective technical writing. On a more technical level, if I were writing a proposal to a business owner to invest in my company, the idea would be to prove to them that my ideas are important to them and their contribution would benefit them as well as me.

Future Goals

As a newly declared Writing major at Syracuse University, I have not yet settled on a particular avenue of writing to pursue as a goal in the future. Once I gain experience in a few different styles and genres, I will be much more familiar and have a clearer vision of my future in writing. From light research of the different genres of writing, I am most interested in Creative writing. I have written somewhere between 40 and 60 poems, a short screenplay, and the beginnings of a novel in my free time so I believe I can harness that passion and transfer it to a career in Creative writing. Creative writing is an interest of mine mainly because, in my opinion, it allows much more freedom and creativity than genres such as Civic writing or Business writing. I have always admired storytellers and movie directors for their ability to take an idea and make it something that people can sit down and enjoy and even become inspired by. The imagination is a very powerful device of the mind and I believe that Creative writing is the genre of writing that allows it to be showcased most freely and clearly. As far as writing creatively from a professional standpoint, any genre that allows me to use my imagination is a plus.

Another genre of writing that caught my eye while researching was Journalistic writing. The ability to report important events and topics that are relevant to the world is a serious gift. There is a huge distinction between a writer who can simply state the facts and a writer who can take the facts, and while using them accurately, create a unbiased (or biased, depending on the nature of the report) report that appeals to an intended audience.