Self- critique project 2

Watching my presentation from project two was a fairly tedious task. I remember writing down everything I wanted to talk about and only getting through about half of those ideas. Watching the video it is clear that I did not rehearse or give much thought to the actual presentation. I can see myself trying to drag out each point, stumbling with "ums" and other fillers to try to lengthen my speech because I did not know how long it would talk me. I was afraid I would breeze through and talk about everything and be left without many original ideas because I had already seen them all. In St. Martin's Handbook there are tips about presenting with note cards. It talks about ordering the note cards which I always do, but I don't just put one point on them like it suggests. This is probably a good idea because I had crammed all my ideas onto 5 or 6 note cards, but if I had them numbered and well planned I would have realized how much time I was spending on ideas that didn't matter as much.

I also didn't have as strong of an introduction as I thought because I started to ramble. I know it is one of the most important aspects of a presentation because it sets the tone for the rest of the presentation. I definitely did not have a strong conclusion because when i saw the 5 minute card go up I realized I wasn't near done and I spent time rushing through my notes looking for things that needed to be discussed. however, I did notice that as I scanned through the rest of my notes I tried to bring the presentation full circle as much as possible. I had introduced the image talking about who it was by and where it was, and where the view could be seen today. I was talking about how it was 69 floors above Rockefeller center and how it had been immortalized. I ended talking about the photographer and how his personality shines through the image in the angles and manner in which he decided to present it. I think this was the best I could do to relate the beginning and end at that time because if I had veered too much it would have seemed out of place within the presentation.

I remember this day and how I didn't care much to dress for the presentation. For the first one, I dressed casual but looked presentable, unlike for the second one. I can see that I was not ready to be in front of the class for this amount of time unprepared and come across confident. My posture looks overly-casual also, both things that the books says are not good because of respect for the audience. I also don't seem interested or enthused about my topic or the act of presenting at all. I also didn't do a good job at appealing to my audiences interests because I clearly didn't think about how I was going to do this. Although not my favorite blog assignment, I am glad I had to watch this for future reference. I swore I would never do a speech unprepared again and then this happened. Now I can assure you I will be prepared for ALL future speeches.