Reflections on Oral Presentation

I cannot believe that I have finally finished my oral presentation. Just a week ago, I was worried about the upcoming presentation because off the persuasive style this presentation had to be delivered in. The truth is I have never experienced doing a persuasive presentation before. Hence, I knew I had to prepare well enough for the presentation in order to put up a good performance! The real challenge was actually in delivering my speech without any hand notes in my hand. Thus, I had to rely on the pictures on my slides to recall what the contents of my speech.

Now that my presentation is over I am glad to say my group and I have done an awesome job! I really enjoyed working with my group members and am sure going to miss the two of them.

I believe my group members and I managed to use all the three backbone of  persuasive presentation: logos,pathos and ethos. Thus, I strongly felt that we did managed to convince our audiences that streaming at the age of 12, which is the current primary education system in Singapore should be revamped as it does not encourage or enhance a student's human development and social integration.

Firstly, knowing each other slides and contents well allowed us to effectively pass our presentation from one to another. Thereby, creating a good flow in information to prevent losing any of our audience's attention. Our delivery was also good as we used our voice to create a serious situation that we wanted our audiences to feel. We also ensured that we all used hand gestures whenever appropriate. We tried to pace our speech well to ensure that we were not going to fast or slow that would cause us to loose of audience's attention. These points mentioned were perhaps one of the strengths in our presentation.

I guess some of the weakness included my failure in introducing my group members. Though I did mentioned their name I did not acknowledged them to the audiences. Besides, we also forgot that some of our audiences were not knowledgeable with common terms such as "Normal Acad" and "Normal Tech" which were short terms for "Normal Academic" and "Normal Technical". Hence, we should have remembered our various target audiences and avoid using short forms which would have left some of our audience lost.

Finally in terms of our visual I think we did an excellent job in the power point slides. All credit goes to William! We actually adopted approach where most of the time a single picture was used to present all the points that we wanted to deliver to our audiences. This was rather a challenge to all three of us as this meant that we had no helping words available on the screen to aid us in our speech. Thus, we had to really spent time preparing and rehearsing our delivery speech. Furthermore, we did this without holding any scripts or hand notes. Personally, this was a challenge as I was really worried that I would either forgot what I wanted to say during my presentation or simply go blank!

This presentation itself was a great experience. I really learned and gained from having such an experience and opportunity. I would also like to thank my fellow classmates who played different roles in the education sector. Thanks for your questions and tips which helped us to improve our proposal as well as provided greater insights to how we can better edit our proposed solution. It was one great persuasive presentation that I would never forget!

Farhanah