English Education Professor

gladwell.com

1. Know your material. But plan to make mistakes anyway. If you talk through a bunch of slides, oh well. Make them available later, and it’s no big deal. If you have to back up and provide extra context that you missed earlier, go right ahead. You can even tell people that’s what you’re doing, although you probably don’t need to. Also, if you’re more of a bullet-point presenter, you can even use your slides as notes to keep you focused throughout. That’s hardly a bad system, though we all know why PowerPoint is evil…
2. Nervousness goes away. Five minutes into it, you’ll stop being nervous and start having a bit more fun. And after doing a few presentations, you’ll stop getting those butterflies in your stomach before hand, and feel a lot more at home on a stage.
3. Pause. Get used to taking small pauses here and there, to take a sip of water, to collect your thoughts, to slow yourself down, or whatever else. It’s okay to have a few seconds of silence.
4. Have a water bottle with you on stage. You’ll need it for the dry mouth. Some lip balm might not be a bad idea either, if you’re talking more than once.
5. If you get stuck on-stage, it’s not a bad thing. You simply move on to the next topic. The audience might notice, or they might not. A lot of the things you’re thinking internally during that moment will never get picked up by anyone else, so if what you’re saying still makes some form of sense, chances are no one will catch it. (And if it doesn’t make sense, often that’s just glossed over! Not everyone is 100% coherent all the time when speaking, and it rarely matters.)
6. Be prepared to allow for spontaneity. You can’t really plan for the asides and diversions that you might make while on stage, but allow them to happen when they do. Often you’ll explore a related idea that ties in with your main points nicely, and it’ll work its way into future presentations. Try to keep yourself always coming back to the topic at hand, or at the very least, make sure to highlight why your diversion is relevant to the discussion. Don’t spend too long on them, however.
7. Have a lot of slides. If you’re worried about time, just make sure you’ve got more material than you need. Chances are you won’t get through it all, but that’s not a terrible problem to have. I’d say 40 to 50 slides is probably enough to fill up an entire hour, as that’s just over a minute each. As you get more comfortable, you can start bringing that number down.
8. Be prepared, but it’s not worth killing yourself. Don’t go for broke on the slides, go for broke on familiarizing yourself with your topic and your slides. Do three dry runs before you get up on stage. Time yourself, and don’t try to back up and re-try anything during the dry runs. Learn how to talk your way out of a factual error you just caught, speaking flub, or even just simple mispronunciation. Pretend there’s an audience right in front of you and you only have that hour. This will quickly highlight the problem points, and often it’ll cause you to re-arrange your slides.
9. If you don’t fill the entire hour, no big deal. (If you’re only hitting the 30 minute mark, you might need to have more material next time.) Q&A can usually fill up the rest of your time slot, and ever since I’ve started speaking I’ve had more fun answering questions than talking during the actual presentation. Try to make your talk amenable to follow-up questions, and if you’ve got a small enough room (anything over 50 people is pushing it) you can even encourage questions throughout.
10. Make sure you’ve got a strong start, and the rest will fall into place. The first few minutes are the most important. The audience doesn’t know what you’re like, you don’t know what they’re like, so you need to get people interested. Plus, the sea of quiet faces is a bit overwhelming, so if you need to script any part of your presentation, this is the best part to script. After you’ve gone through the introduction and started getting into the meat of it, people are likely to be more receptive and you won’t feel so on the spot.
11. Re-use material. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this. If you’re giving repeat presentations, feel free to dip into past talks and pull out points. I lean towards illustrated slides instead of bullet points these days, so I’ve even built up an illustration library which I’ll happily re-use for new talks, even if the subject matter changes.

mezzoblue § Speaking? Tips.

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litweb.net

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The Hispanic population in the United States is growing rapidly and will soon become the largest minority group, surpassing the Black population by 2005. Hispanics have made gains in several key education areas in the past 20 years, but despite these gains, gaps in academic performance between Hispanic and non-Hispanic White students remain. Status and Trends in the Education of Hispanics examines the current condition and recent trends in the educational status of Hispanics in the United States.

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* Hispanic students have retention and suspension/expulsion rates that are higher than those of Whites, but lower than those of Blacks.

* Hispanic students have retention and suspension/expulsion rates that are higher than those of Whites, but lower than those of Blacks.

* Hispanic students have retention and suspension/expulsion rates that are higher than those of Whites, but lower than those of Blacks.

* Over one-half of Hispanic students speak mostly English at home.

* In 2000, 22 percent of 18- to 24-year-old Hispanics were enrolled in colleges and univ

Dropout Rates in the United States: 2000 Highlights
In 2000, 86.5 percent of all 18- through 24-year-olds not enrolled in high school had completed high school. Completion rates rose slightly from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, but have remained fairly constant during the 1990s (figure A and table B7).

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Scribbling Women Home Page
Scribbling Women, a project of The Public Media Foundation, dramatizes stories by American women writers for national radio broadcast. This site provides classroom resources for teaching the rich tradition of American literature by women.