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SPECIAL: How To Do Well In Oral Presentation

I realized it would be nice of me (hehe) to share with my readers some useful tips for Oral Presentation. I am not going to inundate the whole page with a list of suggestions; instead, only key points will be shown here. All the information is gathered from the examiners' comments which was given back to the JC2s early this term.

1) Stress on key words
I noticed that examiners love it when students stress on key words. It is like a must-have for every good presentation. Let me give you two examples:
'Peter has played an instrumental role in establishing the company.'
'Not one or two were injured, but nearly a million civilians were affected.'
I do not have to teach you which words to stress on, do I?

2) Hand gestures
This is another important feature that you must incorporate into your speech to attain high scores. In fact, it would look great if you are able to combine the stress on key words with powerful and convincing hand gestures.
Take a look at this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAz-grHMhTE

3) Maintain eye contact
One mistake students frequently make is that they only tend to maintain eye contact with examiners. Not good enough! Your eyeballs should sweep across the room and you must establish eye contact with the other candidates there.
Bonus tip: Establish a friendship with the other TPJCians there. You will less stressful during the actual day. You can start by exchanging smiles.

4) Don't refer to cue cards
Examiners do not seem to like students who love to refer to their cue cards while presenting their projects. As far as possible, memorize at least 99% of the speech. 3 suggestions on how you can do that are shown below:
- Read to your pet or stuff toys in your bedroom at least four times everyday.
- Play the don't forget the lyrics lines! game yourself. Repeat the whole rehearsal every time you forget a part of the speech, even if you were approaching the end of it.
- Get a license and make a speech in the Speakers' Corner at Hong Lim Park one day. You will have no choice but to memorize all the lines or suffer humiliation. (I am actually joking regarding this one. But you can try if you wish too. Haha.)

5) Don't repeat!!!!!!!!!!
Never ever and even think of repeating any points (excessively) if an examiner poses a question at you. In other words, do not over emphasize on certain issues. It gives an impression to the examiner that you do not really know about your chosen topic widely enough.

And don't forget to smile. Smiling helps to erase 'stage fright'.
One more month and Project Work is over.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...
on

one more tip. on your slides, try not to make it wordy. just keep the bullets and shoot off the details. examiners have alw said that they can read, which means that they only want to hear stuff which you haven't put up on the slides. so my advice is, just put the bullets, so that u have stuff to talk about. a lot of the groups made the mistake of putting stuff onto their OP, and then merely re-hashing it. plus, the fact that examiners have to read less is only an added bonus.

Anonymous said...
on

hello j1s. you'll probably experience how scary the qna section is firsthand during the dry run. just a word of advice: no matter how tense you are, NEVER rush into the answer. take your time, consider the question thoroughly, see what angle you can approach it from and then go into it. also, don't think in terms of 'short and sweet'. the examiners want well elaborated and considered answers (but note: NOT BELABOURED POINTS)- link it to the rationale and purpose behind your project(s) if you can. its all abt bullsh!tting.

also as general advice. for those who are struggling with the structure: i would suggest breaking it into 1)intro and rationale/aims 2) first project 3) second project 4) evaluation 5) further evaluation and conclusion. assign speakers according to their strengths and depth of knowledge of the diff sections b/c the examiner can only ask abt those sections.

and lastly, i would just like to reiterate aforementioned points: stress certain words and memorize your cue cards. if there are screwups like the way i left two of my cuecards at the waiting area, at least there is a way to go on. exude confidence, make sure you don't have a monotonous style of presenting and don't bore the examiners.

p.s: sry if this comes across as pretentious but my group did get our A's so its pretty safe advice.

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