Week 6

Changing China, Fall 2008
Guidelines for Research Presentation—Oral and Written:
Presentation Outline, Bibliography and Copy of Presentation (Audio-Visual)

Submitting Via Webpage:

Presentation outline and bibliography due Thursday, Dec. 4, 5 minutes to Midnight (optional)

or the entire packet due Thursday, Dec. 11, 5 minutes to Midnight

Presentation Outline and Bibliography
Write up and submit via webpage an outline with: 1) your name and topic title; 2) an abstract -- a paragraph-long summary of your presentation 3) an outline (or a table of contents, if you prefer to call it this way) which shows the breakdown and organization of your ideas for the presentation; 4) a list of all your audio-visual examples, including their sources, if your presentation contains these examples; and 5) A list of Bibliography which includes 5 to 10 references you drew on and that your audience might go to for further information. Optionally, add some questions for further research. Your oral presentation will be individual, each about 7 minutes long, which should include time for your talk and a short Q & A session.  The entire week 10 will be used for these oral presentations (with regular classes canceled) and we will sign you for different time slots during week 9, after you return from Thanksgiving.  The written version of the presentation outline along with bibliography is due Thursday, Dec. 4 (optional) or you can turn in the whole packet (with the copy of presentation included) on Thursday, Dec. 11.

Copy of presentation or the entire packet (presentation outline, bibliography and copy of presentation) due Thursday, Dec. 11, 5 minutes to Midnight

Copy of Presentation
Your copy of presentation is the actual materials you use during the presentation, which may include words, audio-visual examples, diagrams, chronologies, maps, tables, graphs and charts.  You may decide to use PowerPoint to put all this information together.  After the presentation, we would like you to send this whole presentation to us through program webpage.  If your topic and presentation do not lend itself to such an audio-visual combination, you may send us the written draft (the script) of your presentation via webpage.

During the Actual Oral Presentation:

Audio-Visual Examples
Various kinds of visual examples are discussed below.  If you provide a musical example in notation, try to provide an audio version to listen to at the same time.  All our classrooms have CD, audio cassette, DVD, and VCR equipment.  You could bring a laptop into any of them and hook it up to the video projector. 
Since you only have seven minutes, don't use more than three to five visual examples or more than two audio examples.  Cut, cut, cut!  Practice giving your presentation, timing it repeatedly.  This will also give you many ideas for tightening and highlighting your ideas and improving your writing.

Diagrams, Chronologies, and Maps; Tables, Graphs, and Charts
If a picture’s worth a thousand words, a good chart or diagram can explain something more clearly than words ever could.  Consider all the things you learn just by looking at visual displays of quantitative information: maps, food labels, traffic signs, tax forms.  Often data sets can be explored by altering their appearance.  Chronology recast a pure text chronology into a visually organized timeline, which shows the passage of time visually.  Then you may go even more creative: organize the same events into a developmental "tree," showing connections between events important in different times and places.
Most of our readings include illustrations, tables, graphs, or charts.  Examples include the many maps and table of verbatim translation in Tao Te Ching given by Jonathan Star.  A table presents numerical data in columns, relating two or more categories of importance (for example, time and amount).  Graphs and charts do the same thing, but with visual interest.  Pie and bar charts are common in newspaper articles about social trends, and line graphs are commonly used to describe the stock market and other economic data.  Computer software such as Excel is great for playing around with ways of presenting your data.  You can certainly create beautiful computer graphics, but if you decide to use freehand sketches, you will still enhance the effects of your oral presentation, although you cannot submit that electronically to the faculty.
Now consider your topic, your themes, your thesis and argument if you have them, and your evidence.  How can you sum up some of the historical, social, musical, or other trends underlying your topic visually?  For example, did size, length, poetic meter, or instrumentation change in a performance genre or religious rite over time?  You may draw on sources; but you must create two or three original versions of information on your own.  Make them clear and informative, not dramatic or flashy.

Some more Tips:

Outlines and Evidence
If you’ve gotten far with your research, you’ve probably begun to get beyond a recitation of facts, to an argument.  Who do you agree with?  How do you put the facts you’ve learned together?  Consider your bibliography.  Make a list of key ideas and facts you've gleaned from your sources.  Begin, perhaps, by making a chronology of events (this is always a popular organizing principle, and it often works).  What happened first, second, and so forth?  Who reacted to whom, and why? 
If you don't end up with an argument you like, you can always go back to a chronological approach.  It's almost foolproof.  But don't settle for a chronology until you've worked hard at developing a point and proving it with relevant evidence and a good argument -- it's almost always a stronger and more exciting approach to a subject than plain old chronology.
From the rough list of ideas and facts you’ve made, write out a plan by spreading your topic paragraph out into an outline with relevant supporting evidence supported for each idea.  From this plan, try different arrangements of your ideas in order to build a more persuasive argument.  We are not using a text that considers the construction of arguments at the moment, but any writing “how-to” book, like Andrea Lunsford’s Everyday Writer, has a section dealing with this interesting, if legalistic, skill.  Wouldn’t it be nice to win more arguments?

Final Tips
Please don’t under-emphasize the NARRATIVE aspect of any research project.  Tell us the story of your research JOURNEY.  Tell us what you started out with.  Tell us what happened next.  Tell us about the times you changed your mind (and then learned at the same time) about something.  And tell us what questions you are still hoping to find the answers to.  If you do this concisely, with illuminating illustrations, your audience will be entertained, engaged, and ready to ask informed, helpful questions.