Twelve - Fourteen minutes

1. Twelve - Fourteen minutes Organizing your Capstone Presentation

2. Purpose This presentation provides guidelines and suggestions for organizing your final presentation in English 797: Capstone Project in Professional Writing and Rhetoric. The material in this presentation has been pulled from the handout “Capstone Project Presentations,” found on the 797 course web site.

3. Title and Personal Narrative • Create an engaging, informative title slide. You can use the main title: subtitle format thus: • General topic: Specific case • Playful/figurative title: Serious/literal explanation • Say something about yourself and how you came to this particular project.

4. Introduction/Overview Summarize your argument in one paragraph. This paragraph should include • the exigence for your project, • an overview of how you addressed the exigence, and • your main claim or claims—make sure they are clear!

5. Rhetorical Situation • Discuss the academic or professional situation that your project addresses. • Be clear about the gap in the research or the professional problem that your project addresses.

6. Theoretical Approach • If your study draws on a specific theory or theories, you may create a slide that introduces them. • Present the theorists’s name with a key quotation or a paraphrase of the assumption the theory allows you to make or the framework it provides for you to use. Don’t try to provide a lecture on your theorist or theory. • Be clear about how the theory affected your project—how it focused you on a particular phenomenon, caused you to ask certain questions, provided a framework for analyzing texts, etc.

7. Methods Discuss how you addressed the situation—that is, your method. • Be very, very clear about the texts you studied or the data you collected (including your sample), your procedures for collecting data, and your method for analyzing your texts or data. • If your method is largely theoretical, say so.

8. Important note The main part of your presentation is still to come, so don’t spend too much time on the lead-up to your argument! Get yourself through the pre-argumentation segment of the presentation crisply and concisely. Don’t allow yourself to extemporize—doing so will devour the minutes.

9. Argumentation This segment of the presentation should help the audience see the “whole” of your argument while providing detailed examples and analysis for only part of it. • In one slide, overview the “arc” of your argument—its main claim and main supporting claims. • In subsequent slides, choose one or at most two supporting claims (“points”) to present in detail. For this claim(or point), show us some excerpts from your texts and explicate them for us. Consider this a “zoom in” that gives us the flavor of your analysis—for one or two points only.

10. Conclusion • Reiterate your main claim, and include your answer to the question “so what?” • Present the implications of your conclusion(s) or remind us how your project has contributed to your field or solved a problem.

11. tips • Practice your presentation, and time yourself. • Be precise and concise. • Write a script if you need help staying focused. • Do not allow yourself to improvise much; doing so leads to spending five minutes on a single slide. • Make eye contact; speak conversationally but with confidence. • Don’t end every sentence on an up-lilt as though you are asking a question.

12. Questions?