Five Approaches to Oral Evaluations

Effects Criterion

Did the presentation accomplish its goal? Did it sell the product/plan? Can the audience successfully answer questions about the material presented?

Pros:

• students may agree that it is like real life
• can be combined with other approaches

Cons:

Written Communication

• Motivate your readers early by engaging them with a worthwhile question, problem, or issue.
• Provide a meaningful title and subdivide your writing with reader-oriented headings.
• Organize your writing to prove a point, not just talk about a topic.
• Give details you can touch, see, hear, smell, taste—a concrete world readers can experience.

The English 250 Test-Out exam is intended to test the communication skills that you already possess, specifically in rhetorical analysis, argument, and designing and orally presenting a visual argument using presentation software. This exam has two parts. In the first part you'll do a rhetorical analysis of an essay (we'll give you the essay at the test-out), and you'll write an argumentative essay of your own. In the second part, you'll prepare a two-minute oral presentation supported by a single electronically designed visual (slide, graph, poster, etc.).

For this assignment you will document a local event and present a textual and visual record of that event to a public audience. You will initially work in a group to identify a significant communication event occurring on campus or in the local area during a one-month period. As a group you will decide how best to preserve the event through various artifacts (video, audio, interviews, published accounts, news articles, etc.). Your group will submit a formal proposal outlining the project and your methods for collecting data that will accurately represent the event.

A source of information that you may not have considered is one mouse click away and may be one of the most valuable ways for you to gather facts and opinions about the issue you’ve chosen to explore. What is that source? Radio programs archived on the Web.

Whereas in the past, radio broadcasts were ephemeral—or at least the tapes of them were not widely available outside the company that put them on the airwaves—we can now easily access radio programs over the Internet in audio archives that allow free downloading of files.

Because successful communication depends on collaborative efforts between communicator and audience, your role as an audience for the poster presentations is as important as your role as speaker. Consider these three components of the audience role: