Say what? No…seriously, what did you say?

I’ve never been a fan of public speaking/presentations, even if I’m only presenting to a small group of people. I generally don’t get nervous in the usual sense, it’s just that I have no concept of spontaneity. You see, a presentation is supposed to use a slideshow (be it computer based or OHP) as a basis for talking points only. If you’ve ever sat through a presentation where the speaker just reads off the slides then you’ll know why this is. Here is where I have a problem, I just don’t have the ability to talk about something without either learning a ‘script’ off by heart or reading from other notes. So, to today’s story.

This morning I was part of an assessed ‘workshop’ (nothing good has ever come of that word), in which I had to find a group (of people I don’t know, which always makes working as a team harder) of people to work with, research a topic and draw up a presentation all within the space of two hours. To make it worse we had to use OHP transparencies instead of Powerpoint. Because we only had two hours, I only managed to write a page or two of notes for the presentation – needless to say I froze in the middle of it. I was trying to read from my notes and from the ‘slides’ at the same time and just totally confused myself. If the lecturer assessing us had an knowledge of what I was actually trying to say, I’d be very surprised. Like I said, it was an assessed piece of work, but luckily only counting 20% towards the final module mark, so hopefully I’ll do better in the exam come January.