In addition to the 15% of your final paper grade that was based on your working draft/outline (due last week), part of your grade for your grade (10%) will be based on a short presentation of your final paper to the class. The three basic things I'd like you to do when you give your presentation are as follows:
1. INTRODUCTION (1-2 min max)
Begin by giving a short synopsis of your paper that clearly tells your audience what your paper is about (your topic), what you are saying (your thesis), and why this topic is important or interesting, and what kind of political issues are raised by or through the media text(s) you're analyzing in your paper.
2. AN OVERVIEW OF YOUR MEDIA CASE STUDY (2-3 minutes max)
After briefly explaining the basics of your paper to the class, you should give some specific information about the actual media text(s) you are analyzing in your paper. It doesn't matter whether your classmates are already familiar with the media in question....your job is to explain what it is and provide everyone with the important information they need to know about it (if you're talking about a film, you should give a synopsis of the plot....if you're writing about a series of news stories, you should say who wrote them, where they were published, etc.). This is the time when you should have something prepared to show or play for people....this could be a clip from a film, a film trailer, a set of images, an audio clip (NOT an entire song) on YouTube, and so on -- it depends on the nature of your case study.
A few brief notes about our your media 'show & tell':
- Be sure to have your videos, websites or images ready to go. If you are showing something that is already online, be sure to have the address handy or simply pull up the webpage before you start to speak.
- If you are showing a set of images to the class, please save them on a USB drive and pull them up on the computer before you start to speak.
- If your paper focuses on music, please just play an excerpt from a song, or short excerpts from a couple of songs. There is no need for your audience to hear an entire song in order for them to understand what you are writing about. Similarly, if you are showing a clip from a movie, please make sure that it is brief and limited to a specific scene.
3. EXPLANATION OF YOUR ARGUMENT (4-5 minutes max)
After giving a brief overview of your paper and familiarizing your classmates with the specific media you are analyzing in your paper, you should spend the rest of your presentation going through your argument. This is the point in your presentation where you are essentially telling people how and why they should make sense of your case study in a particular way (for example: "Gasland effectively politicizes the issue of 'fracking' by challenging the ideology of the gas industry and by educating the public about an issue that is rarely addressed in any depth by news media in the United States"). The overall goal is to explain the significance of the 'thing' you're analyzing, and you should do this by walking your audience through the main points you are making in your paper and giving specific examples when necessary.
