The Oral Presentation

The Assignment
The Oral Presentation is a 10 to 15 minute spoken proposal pitched to the imagined audience (i.e.: those who might fund your idea). This is a formal presentation and you must use visual aids to help convey information clearly and effectively. However, the assignment is not an "oral report" that only conveys information. The point of the presentation is to make a leadership statement for a specific audience that puts information into action by proposing a research-justified solution to a well-defined problem.

The oral presentation is both a useful step in the process of developing your project and a unique assignment for which you will receive a grade. It therefore serves two sometimes competing purposes:

• As an "oral draft" of the final project, it's an opportunity to rehearse your audience-awareness, to organize your research, to develop your plan, and to get feedback from the class and the teacher on how to improve your project. At least half of your grade will be based on how well you have researched your project and how well prepared you are to put together the final proposal.

• As an exercise in public speaking, it's a chance to practice the arts of oral persuasion. Part of your grade will be based on how well you present your information and how well you perform as a speaker.

While instructors will generally focus their grade and their remarks on the strength of your content, offering advice on revision, they will also take notice of your form and poise. Usually, those students who are best prepared with their content do best overall.

The basic parts of the presentation are laid out below. I also suggest that you read over the advice offered here, especially if this is the first time you have ever spoken before a group.

The Basic Parts of the Presentation
Every presentation will have to take its own form, based on the situation and the topic. If you are addressing a potentially resistant audience, for example, you may have to begin by winning them over or addressing possible objections they might have to your idea. Therefore, students should recognize that they cannot always adhere to a single form for the talk, and the outline below may have to be adapted to your particular needs.

As part of the drafting process of your proposal, the oral presentation gives you a chance to firm up your project and work out all of the parts. Most talks will therefore match the basic form of the final paper, and you will probably want to do these nine basic things:

1. Announce your topic with a "title slide," which should display your name, the date, and the title of your talk (this corresponds to your title page)

2. Begin by addressing your specific audience, mentioning why they'll be interested in your project (this corresponds to the letter of transmittal in the final paper).

3. Give your audience some sense of how you'll proceed, perhaps with an outline or overview slide (this corresponds to the table of contents and the forecasting statement in your introduction)

4. Define the problem and specify it in some way (this corresponds to your introduction)

5. Present your research, being sure to cite sources (your research section)

6. Describe your plan of action (your plan or procedures)

7. Tell us what it will cost (your budget)

8. Close with a call to action (your discussion)

9. And along the way, be sure to use visual graphic aids -- just like in your final paper

The only thing missing is your bibliography -- though you are expected to cite your key sources in the presentation. Some teachers may ask for an updated list of sources to accompany your talk.

How Presentations Will Be Evaluated
Your talk will be evaluated in the following areas:

Audience
You must address a specific audience, whom you hope will fund your project. You should help to create the context for your presentation by dramatically addressing that imagined audience's needs and concerns. You might also want to acknowledge the imagined audience in some clear way at the outset, perhaps by thanking imaginary people by name for coming to your talk. You should also maintain a tone and sense of decorum that is appropriate to this audience (rather than one appropriate to the students in the room). Try to remain in character throughout your presentation, as if you truly are addressing your funding source.

Organization
The presentation should be well organized for clarity, covering the five P's of your project proposal:

• the people involved,

• the problem to address,

• the paradigm (i.e.: research and rationale for your approach),

• the plan of action,

• and the price or budget

Most speakers spend the first half of their talk defining the problem and discussing their rationale, and the second half describing the key elements of their plan. Stay focused on the basic parts of your project and recognize that you cannot present everything in the short time you have for the talk.

Evidence
The most important aspect of the presentation is that you show that you have the evidence and research to support your assertions. Just as you would do in a written form, be sure to cite your sources. Name the authorities who inform your paradigm. Name the sources for all statistical data you cite. Name the authors of studies or experiments that you reference. Describe examples or models you reference in specific detail. Ideally, you should strive to position yourself as representing a consensus view -- suggesting that it is not you alone who sees things a certain way, but that there is a wide array of evidence and opinion to support you in your claims.

Visual Aids
You must have at least six PowerPoint slides or visual aids (such as transparency viewgraphs or outlines shown on the overhead projector), and at least three of these must be visual graphic aids, which we define as "visual representations of statistical information" (such as charts or graphs). [Click here for an online PowerPoint Tutorial.] Your budget table will count as one of these. Most of our classes are held in "smart rooms," which come equipped with an overhead projector, slide projector, video monitor, and computer monitor projection for both IBM and Macintosh computers (though you will perhaps need to supply your own laptop to use this last item). If you are not in a smart room, most of these presentation tools (except the computer projection) can be supplied by Media Services -- though you will have to provide your teacher with at least a week's notice about the specific equipment you need.

Budget
As part of your plan, you must include a budget, since it is one of your imagined audience's biggest concerns. You should present the budget as one of your visual aids; be sure to include the total at the end of your table, and line up your ones, tens, and hundreds, just as you would in an equation.

Performance
Organize your presentation around an outline and use note cards if necessary, but do not write out or read the presentation. In other words: speak it; don't read it. You should know your information well enough at this point to be able to speak with confidence and knowledge using only an outline and visual aids to support and guide you. Try to make eye contact with your audience and to connect with them. Speak clearly and enunciate.

Time Management
You must stay within the time constraints laid out by your instructor. Remember that most class sessions only last eighty minutes. This means that in order to accommodate all of the speakers equally (and to cover any other materials for that day), no single speaker can take up more than 20 total minutes of class time (this includes set-up time, delivery, and questions). The ideal presentation will take from 11 to 12 minutes with 5 minutes for questions and a couple of minutes for set up. No speakers will be allowed more than 15 minutes for the talk itself. Most instructors will appoint a student timekeeper to signal the speaker when he or she reaches the 10 minute mark, and again at 12 minutes. At 15 minutes, the timekeeper will call time or an alarm will sound and the speaker will be stopped. Do your best under the time constraints, and remember that your classmates will generally be a more kind and receptive audience than most you'll encounter in your professional career.

Reliability
Because of the limited class time for presentations, once you have committed to a date you must stick to it. Students who postpone their presentations will usually be marked down, unless they have a valid (and authorized) excuse. Because the presentations necessarily fall at the end of the semester, it may not be possible to postpone a presentation.

How to Prepare
As with all assignments, you'll have to prepare in the ways that have worked for you in the past. But here is some advice if you don't know where to start:

• Research your imagined audience. Who do you imagine might come to your talk? What is their degree of prestige and power? What level of knowledge or technical sophistication do they possess? What are their names? Many people like to begin their talk by welcoming the people in the imagined audience and thanking some of them by name for coming. The more specifically you can imagine your audience the better your talk will be.

• Plan ahead. You can't wait to the last minute to prepare for a talk, and the sooner you start the better. The most important things to work on ahead of time are your visual aids, especially any visual graphic aids you want to use, such as video, slides, or laptop computer images. The sooner you begin ordering your overheads and visuals, the more secure you will feel about the presentation itself.

• Focus your talk around key points or examples. Remember that you can't cover everything in your talk, but you will be able to cover the major points of your argument and the chief examples that support you (which you should be able to discuss in detail). If you can establish these points on paper, you will be able to focus your work.

• Prepare an outline. You will definitely want to prepare an outline for yourself, and you likely will want to provide your audience with an outline as well so they can follow you more easily. As you outline, pay attention to the logic and flow of your talk.

• Develop solid visual graphic aids. Remember one rule of thumb: if it can be represented visually, then it should be. You should have at least three visual graphic aids, but if your talk will cover technical information or you will be referencing numerical information you may need to use more than that. These should be effective and useful to your talk.

• You might prepare notecards for details. You shouldn't read your talk, but you may need to write some things down for reference. You may want to use notecards to remember numbers, names, and key details you want to cover. Number your notecards so you can keep them in order, and try to key them to your outline for easy use.

• Know your information and examples so you can talk about them freely. One of the best ways to prepare for the talk is just to read over your research so that you know your topic well. If you can talk about your key examples off the cuff, then you will do fine.

• Rehearse the talk out loud. The key to preparing any fine performance is a dress rehearsal. Practice in front of the mirror or, better, in front of a friend. Time your talk to make sure it will not run over 15 minutes (you'll be surprised how easy that is to do), and so you have a better sense of time management. If you are especially nervous about speaking in a classroom, rehearse your talk in an actual classroom.

• Get some sleep the night before. Since you may need to speak spontaneously at times, and you'll need to answer questions after, a good night's sleep may be the best preparation.

• Double check everything. Make a checklist for yourself. Are your overheads in order? Do you have your notecards? Make sure you have everything covered. Arrive early to test and set up any equipment you plan to use.

The Question of Delivery
Delivery is all about ethos -- do we trust you? Do you impress us? Like the way you package and present your final paper, the way you present your information will go a long way toward keeping their interest and attention. Here is some general advice on delivery:

• Dress the part. Students always ask, "Do we have to dress up for our presentation?" I usually respond, "It depends on your imagined audience." You should definitely wear clothes that are appropriate to the context. If you want to make a good impression, it's generally a good idea to break out some of your better clothes. Sweat pants will not reflect well on you in any situation. For men, a tie is always best, but an outfit you would wear on a casual Friday at an office job might do. For women, any outfit you would wear to an office job should be sufficient. Ask your instructor for specific guidelines.

• Create the context. Clothes are only part of setting the stage for your talk. You'll also want to indicate your imagined audience and acknowledge their interests whenever possible. Highlight the fact that you know your imagined audience well and make sure that you keep them in mind throughout.

• Use a tone appropriate to your imagined audience. One way of keeping the audience in mind is by using the same language and tone that you'd use if they really were in the room. If you are asking University officials for money, for example, you wouldn't want to talk about "the RU Screw." · Enunciate and speak clearly. This doesn't always mean speaking loudly, but you should speak clearly enough so that everyone can hear you.

• Make eye contact. Try to make eye contact with everyone in the room at some point during your talk.

• Project energy and "sell" your idea. If I have one major criticism of student presentations, it's that they rarely give off much energy. Imagine that you are really asking someone for money. You have to sell them on your plan. Turn any nervousness you have about the talk into energy and put a little bit of performance into your presentation -- it will count for a lot with your audience and will keep them interested.

• Ignore distractions and mistakes. Everyone slips up here and there. Don't draw attention to mistakes, but move on so that both you and your audience can leave them behind.

• Move for emphasis -- don't pace. Everyone has ticks and idiosyncratic actions that come out when they speak before a group. One person I know always holds a cup of water between himself and the audience as a sort of shield. Odd ticks are usually an unconscious way of defending yourself from the people you're addressing. Pacing, for example, presents your viewers with a moving target so they can't hit you if they start to throw vegetables or bricks. Try to recognize these actions ahead of time and work through them. You have nothing to fear from your listeners, so try generally to stand still. Just don't stand in front of the screen too often or you'll be blocking people's view of your visual aids.

• Be careful with humor. Many guides to giving oral presentations will tell you to begin with a joke to loosen up your audience. What if you're talking about an especially serious topic? Use humor in moderation and only where appropriate. Be judicious in your use and choice of humor; too much can make you appear self-conscious rather than relaxed.

Advice on PowerPoint Slides and Overheads
Although most of our students are now using PowerPoint slides with the "smart room" projector hookup, overhead transparencies are extremely useful and versatile, and they will likely not go out of style for a long time because they are relatively inexpensive, easy to prepare and transport, and widely available. If you decide to use overhead transparencies, you should still experiment with PowerPoint in order to create professional looking images. The following advice applies to preparing and using both overhead transparecies and PowerPoint slides. For an online PowerPoint Tutorial, click here.

• Begin with a title slide. Be sure to have a title slide that sets the stage for your talk and introduce yourself and your topic. It also helps to make a good first impression -- especially if it is well prepared. The title slide, like a title page, should display your title, your name, the date, and your organization. Use "white space," graphics, color, or design elements that are consistent with your other slides to make it attractive.

• Use a slide for each section of your talk. Each section of your talk -- or even every topic you cover -- should have its own slide. This way you can mark the turns in your argument by changing the visual image, and you can help guide your audience through each part.

• Have one theme per transparency or slide. Remember not to crowd too much information onto each slide. It's best to just try to cover one theme on each one.

• Give each one a header (and number them if it helps you). Each of your slides should have its own head line or header, indicating the topic it covers. You might want these headers to correspond to the outline you presented earlier to make your talk easier to follow. Headers should have a consistent style and form and should give a good idea of what you'll cover in that section of your talk. You might also want to number your slides-- perhaps keyed to your outline -- so that your audience can follow more easily and so you will be able to quickly put your slides back in order if they become mixed up.

• Be sure to cite sources on graphs. Each visual graphic aid that uses information derived from a source should have a "source" reference at the bottom, fully visible to your audience.

• Use large letters and a clear font. Remember that your slides have to be seen in the back of the room as well as the front. Make them as clear and as large as possible, yet strive for an attractive appearance. It's a good idea to have sample slides ready ahead of time so that you can check for readability before or after the class before you are scheduled to present. Then you have time to make necessary changes in font or brightness. Be aware that your computer screen's level of brightness and contrast may not be the same as the level of brightness on the TV screen, classroom projector, or overhead projector that will show your slides. If an image is borderline difficult to see on your own screen, err on the side of caution and heighten the contrast.

• Maintain a consistent font and style. All of your slides should have the same font and if you use a border it should be the same on each one. If you are using PowerPoint, use the same background style for each slide. In the name of creativity, students have tried to vary their slide backgrounds or font choices from slide to slide, and invariably they get comments from student reviewers that the presentations seemed "jumpy" or "disorganized." Often it is less important to follow any rule than it is to be consistent in the styles you choose. Such consistency helps to project a sense of unity to your presentation.

• Try a unifying border or logo. To help further project that image of unity, you can use a logo or border on each slide. This is especially useful when you are representing a company, where you may want to have your company logo or a border with colors or a style consistent with your company image.

• Jazz it up with color if you can. There is no question that people are impressed by color, and your presentation will stand out more if you use color in your slides and in your visual aids. However, if expense is an issue you may want to stick to black and white.

• Strive for active voice. Use active voice forms in your overheads whenever possible, just as in all business writing.

• Put numbers in a visual graphic form. Remember that if something can be illustrated, it probably should be illustrated. A picture is not always worth a thousand words, but it will usually keep you from using a thousand words to say the same thing. If a number or an idea or a definition or a procedure can be illustrated it probably should be. Also, if you can use a slide to help reinforce your audience's understanding, then be sure to have a slide.

• Let the audience absorb each slide. Too often students don't leave their slides up long enough, often because they are hurrying through the presentation. Try to manage your time well and use a slide for each section of your talk, leaving each one on the projector until you raise a new topic.

• Point to your slides for reference. Draw your audience's attention to key aspects of your slides by pointing to them. You can do this in several ways -- on screen, on overhead, with a shadow, a laser pointer, or with a transparency pen.

Some Overhead Don'ts

• DON'T USE ALL CAPS. Studies show that people can distinguish words and parts of sentences more easily if you use both lower case and capital letters. (Can you believe people actually study stuff like that?)

• Don't put too much information on each slide, or use long sentences, because viewers cannot absorb it all. Try to put no more than short phrases on each slide, and don't overcrowd them. If you find yourself putting a lot of information on a slide, then likely you need to break that information up to fit on several slides, or you need to reconsider the level of detail you are presenting..

• Don't use letters smaller than 20 point. Remember that the people in the back of the room will have trouble with small letters. Again, try a trial slide the class before you are scheduled to present in order to check anything you have questions about.

• Never violate the rule of parallel form. Each overhead should have information that fits together in such a way that you can list it using phrases in parallel form. This helps the audience to see connections and to organize information.

• Don't Be Inconsistent In capitalizing Words. Don't be inconsistent about anything -- but this is a typical mistake.

• Don't forget to proofreed for typos. Typos on an overhead are like an unzipped fly -- they destroy your ethos and make you look silly.

• Don't use irrelevant clip art. Viewers are usually very interested in art whenever it appears on an overhead, and it will often get an audience's attention. That's precisely the problem, though, with irrelevant clip art: if the picture doesn't actually contribute to your message it will distract your audience from it. They'll spend more time looking at your pictures than listening to you, so if a picture doesn't help communicate your ideas it will not help communicate your message.

• Avoid "chartjunk." Your audience will not have time to appreciate incredibly creative graphs. Your main goal is to get the relevant information across to your audience in a way that will create an immediate visceral reaction. Highlight discrepancies, needs, level of waste, or whatever you are trying to convey as the problem you are addressing through your use of color or your choice of graph. Choose the best kind of graph (pie chart, bar graph, line graph) for your information. Rather than importing a complicated graph from a Web source or xeroxing or scanning it from a book, create your own simplified version to pinpoint exactly what you need your audience to see.

• Avoid 3-D effects in your graphs, and whenever possible include the number you want the audience to focus on at the end of a bar or line, or as a callout. If you use a pie chart, include the actual percentages rather than expecting the audience to figure out how big the segments are. Remember that all pie chart numbers reflect percentages, and must add up to 100%.

• Avoid distracting "frills." While falling or zooming text and sound effects are interesting innovations in PowerPoint, be aware that they may be time-consuming and distracting to your audience. I once had a student who set up his slide presentation so that each letter of a word zoomed in from the sky to the sound of gunshots. Needless to say, that was the only aspect of his presentation that most people remembered.

• Don't bury your message with creativity. Keep the focus on yourself and your goal. With so many options, students are often tempted to spend days crafting incredibly creative slide shows, and not enough time checking to see that what they are presenting is adequately defined or logically expressed. Your slides should not be the subject of the presentation; rather, they should support the subject, your project.

Turning PowerPoint Slides into Overhead Transparencies

Most of the time, if students have prepared their entire presentation using PowerPoint, they will use PowerPoint slides if the technology is available. However, some students still prefer using overhead transparencies. The one crucial difference between these two formats that you should consider as you work on your presentation is that a dark background with light letters works best for a PowerPoint presentation given with a laptop hookup, and a light background with dark lettering generally shows up better with an overhead projector. If you start with one format in mind and then change your mind, remember to adjust your slide presentation accordingly. You have several options to easily turn PowerPoint slides into transparencies:

1. You can save your presentation to a disk or CD and bring it to a store like Staples, OfficeMax, or Kinkos. They will help you print the slides onto transparencies. Bear in mind, though, that you will be charged for your computer time as well as for each slide. Students who have used this option are usually surprised and aggravated by the expense.

2. You can save your presentation to a disk or CD, buy a box of blank transparencies at a college bookstore or office supply store (like Staples) and bring both to a RUCS computer lab. You MUST buy the kind of transparencies that are rough on one side and smooth on the other, not the old-fashioned kind that are smooth on both sides. Usually the box will be labeled as "suitable for use in printers," or something similar. Ask the attendant to load your slides into the color printer for you. Do not wait until the last minute to do this, as some Rutgers Computer Labs have a limit on the number of color pages you can duplicate at one time. [Students have gotten around this limit by convincing friends to go with them, but do not count on the availability of friends, the lab, or the color printer. I know of some students who had to go to several labs on different campuses to finally get their entire presentation duplicated. Especially at the end of the semester when demand is great, the machines tend to break down.]

3. The easiest method is to use your own color printer (or one you, family members, or friends have access to). Buy a box of printer-compatible transparencies and print your own set of slides. If you are unfamiliar with the process, do one first to make sure that you have loaded the transparencies into the printer with the right side up. If you try to print on the shiny side, the ink will not stick.

What if your Presentation is too Large for a Disk?

Sometimes students include several photographs or visual images that require a large amount of disk space. If you do not know how to compress your files so that the presentation will fit on a floppy, you have a few options.

1. You can e-mail your presentation to someone who has a CD-burner, and beg that person to burn your presentation onto CD. Most laptops have a CD-Rom drive.

2. You can separately load your presentation onto two floppies and get to class early enough to immediately load both disks onto the teacher's laptop as one presentation. Do not attempt to switch disks in the middle of the presentation, as that will take up too much valuable time.

3. Some students in the past have successfully loaded their PowerPoint presentations onto their own Web site, and then used the smart classroom's internet capability to to access it. Until every teacher becomes Web savvy, every classroom smartbox becomes infallibly dependable, and the Web access at Rutgers is reliably available and instantaneous, this is not a good idea. Nothing is more boring than sitting and watching someone fumble around trying to kill time while a Web page loads.

4. You could bring your own laptop with the presentation already loaded and hook that up to the classroom smartbox.

PowerPoint Tutorial

We have prepared an online PowerPoint Tutorial for your use:

PowerPoint Tutorial

Sample PowerPoint Presentation on "Ghost Posts"

Final Words of Advice
Don't try to educate your audience, and never talk down to them. The biggest mistake that students make in presenting a technical subject is trying to get their audiences "up to speed" by giving lots of background information, usually in the form of textbook knowledge. Giving background information is always a mistake, for at least seven reasons:

1. It destroys the fiction you are trying to create that you are speaking to a knowledgeable audience. Right away, you have confused your listeners as to who your audience really is.

2. It sets the wrong tone, making your audience feel like they are being talked down to by a school master. Treat your audience as equals and they will prick up their ears in order to become equal to your conception of them.

3. It underestimates your audience's intelligence. Because you are speaking to a college educated audience, most of your listeners will already possess much of the basic knowledge needed to follow your talk. There may even be some audience members as expert as yourself in your field of study. Listeners will feel insulted by your explanations of "osmosis," for example, and will tune you out. Challenge them to tune in instead.

4. It wastes time that you will need to present your idea. Remember that you only have about 12 minutes (and a maximum of 15) to give your talk. How can you present everything you learned in your core curriculum in such a short time? You can't, so don't try.

5. It mistakenly tries to anticipate questions which are best left to the question and answer period. Remember, if someone in the audience doesn't understand something they can always ask about it afterward. And what question is easier for you to handle that the most basic questions where you get to show off the breadth of your knowledge?

6. It will not make sense in the abstract. Because information is never useful except in context, audience's have very difficult time understanding definitions, explanations, or lessons offered in report form apart from the flow of argument.

7. If a presentation is organized logically, your audience will follow your argument even if they do not understand all of the details. If you feel it is necessary to explain certain technical ideas, remember that it is much more useful to offer such explanations briefly in the context of your argument (or in the question period after) than it is to give them ahead of time. Just do your thing with confidence and we will be impressed -- even if we don't fully understand what you're talking about.

Logic should govern above all, and information should only be offered on a need-to-know basis. This final point was brought home to me once listening to a student presentation on training co-op students to use proper care and technique in recording information in the field so as to comply with government regulations. Basically, these students were making many small mistakes (such as recording temperatures in Fahrenheit instead of Centigrade) that were destroying the integrity of whole projects. What could be more understandable? Yet the speaker began by presenting "background information" about the type of studies the students were doing and the specific data they were collecting. By the time she had finished offering that long explanation she had to rush through her plan to train these students in better data collecting techniques. As one reviewer in the audience noted, "I had no idea what she was talking about until she said that these students were using felt-tipped pens on rainy days to write down information." Basically, the audience did not need to know what was being written down with that felt-tip pen to understand that such pens posed a problem in the field.

State your argument up front -- don't keep your audience in the dark.
You'll never have your audience's attention more than you do at the outset of your talk. So tell them as much as you can up front. Someone once said that the best advice for giving a talk is to do three things: "One: tell your audience what you're going to say; two: say it; and three: tell them what you said." While following that advice literally will lead you to an overly formulaic presentation, it does suggest the importance of leading your audience clearly through your argument with all of the forecasting statements and signposts you can muster. As I suggest above, one of the easiest ways of helping your audience to follow your talk is to provide an outline at the outset and then use overheads to signal your transitions (just as you should use strong topic sentences to signal your transitions at the opening of a new paragraph in writing).

Close with a polished call to action.
Since the basic form of the presentation covers (1) the problem, (2) the paradigm, and (3) the plan, the closing of your presentation should sum up the plan you have in mind and urge your audience to act upon it. Hence the content of your close should focus on what needs to be done, and it should take a form that tries to influence your audience to act. Use whatever rhetorical powers you can muster to get them to listen and act. Listeners tend to remember best what comes at the beginning and at the end of a presentation more than anything in between. Therefore, in the same way you should strive to make a good first impression, you should close your talk with words that reflect well upon you as a speaker and offer up the "take home" message of your talk in a memorable way. Some speakers actually write out their closing words in order to polish and hone their form and tone. You might want to memorize your closing words in the form of a little speech filled with rhetorical flourish so as to leave your audience with a powerful final idea while signaling your conclusion. A strong close is sure to get a strong applause, in part because it lets the audience know with confidence that you're finished.

Recognize that it's normal to be nervous.
Most people feel a bit nervous whenever they have to speak before an audience, especially the first few times they have to do so. Remember that this is normal. If fears persist, though, here are a few thoughts that might help you get past your initial fears:

• Remember that you know more about your topic than anyone in the room. Just try to make yourself clear and you will automatically have something to offer the audience.

• Your listeners take your nervousness for granted. In fact, since most student listeners are not used to giving presentations themselves, they expect everyone to be nervous and will either overlook or identify with your situation.

• This might be the most friendly audience you'll ever face. As fellow students, your listeners are on your side and generally want to give you high marks: I often notice that student reviewers generally see the most positive aspects of individual talks and tend to overlook problems (even after I have urged them to offer critical comments).

• Recognize that if this is your first talk it is a necessary rite of passage. The more practice you have giving presentations, the easier they will get and the less nervous you will feel each time.

• Turn fear into motivation. Nervousness can be a spur to greater preparation. Fear is not necessarily a negative thing, but the way you respond to it has to be positive. One common negative response to fear is procrastination, which is merely avoidance behavior (a variation on running away). The best response to fear is work, which can only help you in developing your project and bolstering your confidence in your subject knowledge.

If you still have worries or fears, talk them over with your professor or with friends. The more you face your fears, the better off you'll be in the long run.