Presentations That Are "Sticky" and Don't "Suck"

It was August 2005 and I was a freshman at the University of Montevallo. It was the first day of classes and I was a ball of nerves. In the weeks leading up to my first college class, I wasn’t nervous about the coursework or even living in a dormitory. I was overly excited about being a college student and looked forward to everything about college life. My nerves were solely because of one class:  COMS 101 Foundations of Oral Communication (Introduction to Public Speaking). Just the idea of giving a presentation in front of a room full of other students and a professor made me sick to my stomach. Not only did I make it through COMS 101 (not without some anxiety however), I ended up choosing a career where I am basically a public speaker every day of my life…

As an educator, creating presentations and public speaking are very familiar territory. Although I sometimes still get a little anxious speaking in front of a group, presenting in front of ninth graders is much less intimidating than colleagues or peers. In our line of work, it isn’t just about a lot of speaking; it’s about creating informative and appealing presentations to accompany our speaking.

Chapter four of Crafting Digital Writing: Composing Texts across Media and Genres focuses on crafting meaningful presentations. I found the most helpful concept in the chapter to be the suggestions or principles to make presentations that are “sticky” and that don’t “suck”. These suggestions are imperative for educators, especially for high school teachers, for reasons that go without needing explanation.

According to Hicks in Crafting Digital Writing: Composing Texts across Media and Genres, the “secret to effective presentations is an intentional focus on craft” (Hicks, 2013, p. 61). Both students and educators alike should concentrate on the core principles of contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity when constructing a presentation (Hicks, 2013, p. 61). Although some of the books that Hicks refers  to were written for the corporate world, their advice about presentations can easily translate to the world of education. These books all point out that there is more to a good presentation than just persuading or promoting a product. The two main factors that appear again and again are storytelling and stickiness (Hicks, 2013, p. 62). In fact, as Hicks later states, “Presentations are often a unique blend of telling a story, sharing information, and making an argument and presentation gurus remind us that storytelling and stickiness are factors that go into delivering an effective presentation” Hicks goes on to say, “It is not enough simply to share information or step logically through an argument; the presentation must contain some sense of passion and purpose” (Hicks, 2013, p. 67). It is a fine line between an informative presentation that is also effective in both “storytelling” and “stickiness” but as educators, this task is imperative for reaching our students.

See my presentation below for the six principles from Chip and Dan Heath’s text, Made to Stick:Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die and Joshua Johnson’s 10 Tips for Designing Presentations that Don’t Suck.

References:

Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2007). Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

Hicks, T. (2013). Crafting Digital Writing: Composing Texts across Media and Genres, 61-63.

Image retrieved from http://image.slidesharecdn.com/howtocreatepresentationsthatdontsuck-140716053038-phpapp01/95/how-to-create-presentations-that-dont-suck-3-638.jpg?cb=1405542733

Johnson, J. (2010a, 2010b). 10 Tips for Designing Presentations that Don’t Suck.

Is This Piece of My Digital Writing Worth Sharing?

Often times I feel like I am a character in those infamous information overload commercials. You know the ones. Where the characters spout out random words and phrases that make no sense at all. While sorting through information, sometimes my thoughts become as jumbled and busy as the search engine results on my screen. Not only am I overloaded with information, I am daunted with deciphering between web-based mentor texts. As an educator and student, I spend much of my day "surfing" the net. I research information to enhance my lessons, I try to find answers to my students' (sometimes absurd) history questions and I research information for my own professional and personal reasons. I spend a great deal of time reading others' digital writing, to say the least.

I began my own digital writing as a middle schooler by using MySpace. I loved having my own personal place on the web. I enjoyed "decorating" my page with images, icons, quotes and even music that matched my personality and style. I quickly discovered that I could enhance my page by learning simple HTML (hypertext markup language). Although my digital writing was important to me (and maybe to my "top friends") I'm not sure that I actually wrote anything worth publishing for the world to see.

Troy Hicks, author of Crafting Digital Writing: Composing Texts Across Media and Genres, makes a significant point that in relation to digital writing, "the idea is that we must be deliberate in what we type when we post to our social networks, how we frame a photograph, how we edit video, or any other number of choices that affect the composition of our texts" (Hicks, 2013, p. 20). I wasn't necessarily deliberate in my early digital writing and it doesn't come natural to our 21st century students either. As Hicks states, "students may be 'tech comfy' but they are not necessarily 'tech savvy'. Being a digital native isn't enough" (Hicks, 2013, p. 20). They may be born digital but we are charged with the task of helping them become not only creative but purposeful digital writers (Hicks, 2013, p. 25).

In order to become better digital writers we must even think like digital writers when we are reading web-based mentor texts. Rhinegold offers us the following questions to ask ourselves, questions that perhaps I should have considered as a Myspacer, "Am I simply sharing a link to something that someone else crafted or offering my own succinct commentary on it? Am I composing my own response as a blog post, then sharing a link via Twitter? How much writing am I doing when I share something via social media? Am I intentional about it?" ...and most importantly... "Is this piece of my digital writing worth sharing?" (as cited in Hicks, 2013, p. 33). These are questions that our students should be prompted with in order to carefully think about not only their assigned digital writing, but also their digital writing on social media. Additionally, Hicks formulated the MAPS workshop model. MAPS helps writers see the broader context of a writing assignment by considering mode: the genre of a text; media: the form(s) in which a text is created; audience: the reader, listener, or viewer of the text, both intended and incidental; purpose: the auction the author takes, in both an academic and a personal sense; and situation: the context for the writer herself or himself, as well as the demands of the writing task (Hicks, 2013, p. 21).

Using Hicks' MAPS workshop model and reflecting on Rhinegold's questions, students can take their digital writing to the next level by pursuing written craft that is worthy of becoming a web-based mentor text for others. And honestly, isn't that what we all hope our digital writing will become? When we hit publish, post or send, we hope for likes, retweets, comments and praise that our digital writing is worthy enough for others' use and admiration.

References

Hicks, T. (2013). Crafting Digital Writing: Composing Texts Across Media and Genres, 20-33.

Image retrieved from http://learningedgeadventures.wordpress.com/presentations/reduce_information_overload/

Image retrieved from http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-media-modern-marketing_b50969

Rhinegold, H. (2012). Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.