CHAPTER ONE DON'T SWEAT IT Delivering a presentation com bines the skills of writing and speaking First you need to find and organize your information Then you need to present it Unlike a written paper a presentation is intended to be heard rather than read And that's what might scare you the idea of getting up in front of a group and speaking If so take heart public speaking is the number one fear of many students and adults alike If most people are so afraid of public speaking why does your teacher want you to do it Well for one learning how to give a presenta tion now will make it less scary in the future And you almost certainly will have to speak publicly in the future Believe it or not almost any career you might pursue will require some sort of speaking skills Teachers law yers doctors business owners poli ticians scientists and engineers all use public speaking skills at one time or another some on a daily basis And even if your future career doesn't demand that you speak to groups of people you will likely need to talk to your boss from time to time and it won't hurt to be able to persuade her to give you a raise But that's in the future Right now preparing a presentation will help you learn how to find evaluate and organize information It will teach you
to communicate clearly and to de velop critical thinking skills Critical thinking helps you determine wheth er an argument is sound whether someone's opinion can be trusted or whether one event really did cause another This type of reasoning helps you to discover the relationships between ideas Presentations also serve a more immediate purpose They allow you to interact with your audience In some cases you might inform your listeners oille about a subject that is new to them Or you might teach them how to do something In other cases you will try to persuade listeners to change their mind or their actions or both And your speech could even make a difference in their lives Maybe you'll persuade a classmate to eat more healthfully or maybe you'll inspire your whole class to start a recycling program or to hold a fundraiser for an important cause The good news is that you already have some of the skills needed for giving a presentation even if you've never given one before in your life How can that be Many of the skills needed for presentations are ones that are also used in everyday conver sations When you talk with someone you think about who that person is before choosing the topic of conver sation and even the words you use For example if you are talking to your teacher you probably won't mention how you blew off your homework to play a video game But with a group of friends you might celebrate the fact that you made it to level 15 pepper ing your conversation with all sorts of slang words that you wouldn't use when talking with your teacher or another adult because let's face 2006
YOU CAN HAVE BRILLIANT IDEAS BUT IF YOU CANT GET THEM ACROSS YOUR BRAINS WON'T GET YOU ANYWHERE Lee Iacocca
