{"id":77,"date":"2019-08-11T19:36:40","date_gmt":"2019-08-11T19:36:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.usnh.edu\/comm543\/chapter\/exemplary-oral-presentational-communication\/"},"modified":"2023-08-29T13:38:39","modified_gmt":"2023-08-29T13:38:39","slug":"exemplary-oral-presentational-communication","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.usnh.edu\/com480\/chapter\/exemplary-oral-presentational-communication\/","title":{"raw":"Exemplary Oral Presentational Communication","rendered":"Exemplary Oral Presentational Communication"},"content":{"raw":"An entire course can be devoted to this topic since there are several levels of proficiency in oral presentation. This chapter will be limited to foundation techniques and strategies you will need to fulfill the Oral Presentation assignment. Refer to the Oral Presentation assignment brief in the course for the exact details about what you need to produce and how to submit it for the course.\r\n

Elements of oral presentation<\/h2>\r\nSo far, we reviewed the Organizational Principles of communicating with an audience: context, audience, and purpose of your communication. We also reviewed the elements of Rhetorical Strategies which draw upon techniques of persuasion based on logic, emotion, and credibility.\r\n\r\nAll of these apply to the formation of an oral presentation just as they would if you were writing an essay, letter to the editor of a newspaper, or a business proposal. Now we will review the guidelines for structuring an oral presentation in a narrative form<\/em> that enables your audience to connect your individual messages into a coherent whole.\r\n
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Narrative Form:<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

The audience's need for coherent structure in your communication applies no matter what your audience's characteristics may be.<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nWhat is narrative form?<\/strong>\u00a0 First, an analogy. There is a difference between steering<\/em> a car and driving<\/em> a car. It is appropriate to say that if you can just keep your car on the road and abide by the rules, you can say that you know how to drive a car. But anyone who has driven a car long enough knows (as you might say to a new teenager driver) that driving a car is much more than just keeping it between the lines on the road. Drivers have to take into consideration the mentality, habits, sobriety, and tendencies of other drivers, the context of driving on particular roads that inform driving strategies, the weather and road conditions, the capabilities of the vehicle, and even the enjoyment of the driving experience itself. In short, driving is much more than simply steering and following the rules.\r\n\r\nOral presentation is just the same: it is much more than simply speaking the words.\r\n\r\nAs we have covered previously, Organizational Principles call for knowing about the audience to whom you are presenting such as their individual and group characteristics, i.e. age, culture, experience, expectations, etc. In oral presentation, narrative form calls for being aware of your audience's need for messages to come together like a story: connected, coherent, and meaningful; a feeling of a beginning middle and end. And this applies no matter what the variations may be in the audience characteristics.\r\n\r\nThere are many interpretations of narrative form for oral presentations that take into account the wide ranging needs, contexts, and venues where oral presentations take place. For example, when Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple Computer, makes a worldwide conference presentation, his narrative form would be different than a citizen speaking at a town hall assembly \u2013 even if both of these speakers draw from the same playbook on Organizational Principles and Rhetorical Strategies.\r\n\r\nFor the sake of simplicity, this chapter will focus on the basic narrative form used by scientists and academics to present information at conferences and seminars. The basic narrative structure of this approach is applicable to any other form of oral presentation, with some variation.\r\n\r\nThe resource cited below is from the Scitable<\/a> website produced by the Nature Publishing Group<\/a>, a global publisher of research studies known for their premiere publication Nature<\/em><\/a>.\r\n\r\nWhat to look for as you read: <\/strong>\r\n

\u21d2 Focus your attention on the basic narrative structure in this article:<\/p>\r\n\r\n