Business Writing @ Purdue

I found the old reading assignment “Death by Power Point” to be very helpful in constructing our business plan (http://engl420fa07.rhetoricat.com/node/672). This power point presentation shows exactly what to do and what not to do when it comes to giving an effective presentation. I really agreed with the slides (12 – 36). These slides explian the three basic things that a presenter need to use or keep in mind in order to how a successful presentation. The four basics are; significance, structure, simplicity, and rehersal.  I have always known theat the more simple a presentation is the easier it is to convey your message. It is also easier for the auidience to understand and possibly remember your material. The three bullets of significance are as follows: significane creates passion, passion creates atttention, and attention leads to action. This slide was probably the most important of all the slides. It tells people that unless they are interested and personally invested in their project no one will care. If the presenter does not show an interest in being there, then the audience will not either. I also agree with the fact that if you cannot have passion about your topic, do not even bother presenting it. The reading “A Rough Guide to Multimedia” was not as inspirational as was “Death by Power Point”. It discussed the steps of creating a project. Which I felt were very vague and did not increase my knowledge on the subject. It also tocuhed on the delegation of responsibilites of the group. I felt that reading through the document did not really teach me anything new. I was reminded of a few facts along the way such as; differnet picture file types, what not to do when using bitmap and jpeg files, and how to propersly capture and incorporate video. It seemed like this document would be a good checklist once we have completed our project. AS for now, it just seems like a bunch of things I have already learned about. The Thompson Handbook will also play a small role in creating our multimedia project. Chapter 24 explained how to use images to persuade your audience. This will be important once again because we must make sure that our images have a point and that the point is clearly portrayed by the image we have selected. Having images that do not seem to have any reason being there will only hurt a presentation.  Another source that we have previously read was the OWL website on evaluatiing your sources (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/553/01/). This is another reading that will be good to brush up on before preparing our final multimedia presenation. It tells us to be very careful when selecting our sources and to make sure they are all viable and substatintiated. This again will be very important to our multimedia project because having people question our sources will make us look unprofessional.  All in all, these reading will be a good set of checklists to go over before turning in our final project. Now that we know what to look for and how to go about getting it done, it will make our project that much better.