Communication Centers by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books

Chapter 8

Tutoring Tasks

Presentation Aids

In the preceding chapter, we jumped the gun a bit in talking about presentation software. The goal in that chapter was to talk about how to help students learn to deliver a speech well while using the software. In this chapter, the goal is different. It is to discuss why and how to use visuals—not just presentation software but a wide range of presentation aids.

Uses of Visuals

One reason to use visual images is, perhaps unfortunately, because they are expected. First, we have become such a visual culture that a presentation without images seems naked or incomplete. Second, perhaps without thinking about it, we make judgments about the quality of a presentation—and a presenter—based on the quality of his or her visuals. This second point relates to the concept of ethos: we assume that the maker of high-quality visuals is of high quality (i.e., is competent) in other areas. Neither of these reasons for using visuals is unimportant, but there are other, more rhetorical reasons for doing so.

Illustration. The first is to illustrate an idea. Often it is an idea that will be much clearer if shown visually. It could be a business’s organizational chart, or it could be a complex biochemical process. It might be raw data, illustrated in a table that the audience will be guided in studying, or it might be a graph of one sort or another showing how a whole is divided, how a variable has changed over time, or how two (or more) variables compare. Perhaps just as often a visual will be employed if its use makes an idea more vivid for the audience. Here is where pictures often come in. Once, they were difficult to come by, but, in the age of Google Images, they are readily available.

Students (and perhaps others) have a tendency to overload a presentation with visuals. Communication center tutors should help students resist this tendency, for it is very easy for visuals to take over a presentation, making the orally delivered text little more than the accompaniment. Students should choose visuals carefully, whether the purpose is to add clarity or to add vividness.

Guidance. Another function is to guide the audience through the presentation. Before presentation software, this function was occasionally served by a poster or a flip chart page that offered an outline of where the presentation was going to go. Perhaps the poster was visible throughout as a reminder; perhaps the flip chart page was repeated as a reminder. With presentation software, an audience can be guided not just through the overall structure but through the structure of every component. This represents a valuable use of visual technology; however, as we will discuss later, it can be overdone.

Readability, Clarity, Control. In earlier decades, visual images were rare in academic writing. They began to appear more frequently in technical and business fields, so the earliest discussions of how to use them well appeared in technical and business communication courses. Although much has changed over the decades, three fundamental principles introduced in those textbooks still seem valid.

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