After reading Carolyn Miller's essay, "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing," I really began thinking about the importance of presentation and writing skills in the working world outside of the classroom.
As an engineer, presentation is everything when it comes to putting your work on the market for potential clients to buy into. It is even more important when you are presenting your preliminary design for a client's approval as I recently learned in my Capstone Design Class.
After the many hours of design and Auto CAD work, I had to put together a proposal to sell my design idea to a perspective "client" who had hired me for the job. I had to show all the features that were requested and if necessary explain why I did not include some due to technical reasons.
The most important portion of the presentation was the oral section, because when you are presenting in front of a live audience, there is no spell check, word count, or edit-undo ability you can call upon when you make a mistake like these people did......
You couldn't be more right about presentation. Being an engineer myself, every detail of a written proposal must be without error; 'feet' instead of 'inches' can ruin a project. A perfect written proposal means nothing, however, if you can't explain it exactly to the client.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't consider the oral presentation too different from a written proposal. If the oral section is the most important, would you not write out a draft/script of what you intend to say and then practice saying it over, and over, and over? The more you practice, the more comfortable you are with what you are saying and less likely to make those slip ups.
ReplyDeleteBut then again, mistakes happen! I know I've definitely had a few embarrassing slip ups!
I've found when writing an oral presentation to not use big words or to use easy-to-say phrases, and if when I practice for the presentation I find something that is easy to slip up on I fix it before hand. It's easier to fix it before it becomes a problem.
ReplyDeleteI would agree that oral presentations aren't that much different than written presentations, other than the fact that you can edit your presentation a little big based on how the audience is responding and must be ready to answer any questions that they have about what it is you are presenting.
ReplyDeleteI feel that Oral presentations are quite opposite that written ones. Written presentations give you the ability to not be in the situation. You can be 100 miles away and the audience can imagine what how you felt when you wrote the presentation. If you are orally giving the presentation, you have the ability to very easy come off as arrogant or something else that people don't like. This could be from body language or just the way you look.
ReplyDeleteDuring my coop, many customers that meet me in person said that I was arrogant when they called in to complain (complaints from customers were welcomed because it meant that I was doing my job well, so it wasn't like I was doing a bad job) because I usually took charge of the situation and told them what had to happen for everything to meet specifications. The ones that I communicated with by email were different and generally stated that I knew what I was talking about. I always knew what I was talking about, but unlike the ones I meet in person, they didn't see a 21 year old in charge of millions of dollars. So oral presentations are by far more strenuous