Anaylisis of Carnegie Communications PPT Presentation

Just from taking public presentation here at Lynchburg College, I was able to immediately recognize that Carnegie did a poor job with their PPT slide show and presentation. The speaker relied too heavily on the use of text in her slide shows, and I even saw her having to look back at her slides to see where she was in her speech. This is poor presentation skills; not to mention it is very distracting to have a million lines of text thrown up on a screen. As such, the audience ends up staring at the slide show during the whole presentation rather than looking at the speaker.

Not all information needed to be put up on the slide shows, and I felt that the speaker should have relied more on the use of black blank screens so that we would be focusing on the speaker rather than the screen. Their were a couple of instances where Carnegie used text graphics to present information and this was very effective. As I have learned from my public presentation class, audiences lose attention very quickly if text heavy screens are the dominant part of a speech; therefore, using graphics in presenting information works with your audience to trigger that information in a visual message - which results in the audience more likely to remember aspects of a speech.

These tricks will be easier to employ in our English 210 PPT presentations because the nature of the assignment requires us to use lots of graphics and images. As a result I am confident that I will be able to create an effective power point presentation to lure high school students into wanting to pursue English as a major or minor at Lynchburg College.

Rhetoric of Employment Documents

It is my understanding that knowing how to build and create a resume is something everybody has to do at some point or another in their life. I would wager that most everybody in our class has completed some form of a resume as well. If not, they probably have never had a job and must have inherited millions from a dead relative, struck it big at the slots, or maybe stole some money? I hope the latter isn't the case...

In my experiences, creating a resume requires you to remember all your past achievements, employment, education, and anything else that would be beneficial for your future employer to know. The problem for me, is that I can never remember the names of my previous bosses - some of which don't deserve to be remembered in my mind.

The documents on the Pearson website about resumes, don't really tell me anything new or that I didn't already know. Templates for writing professional looking resumes are available online very easily. One type of employee document that the website mentions that I have had no previous experience with is an application letter. The template for the application letter lays out everything one needs to do clearly, and I understood it. The documents will provide a good source for our class to start creating these documents, but overall the documents didn't teach me anything I didn't already know.