Presentation Grade + Work Time

In class today, I got back my grades for the presentation I did a while back, along with some helpful feedback. Because I’ve rewatched the video of me presenting multiple times in the last couple of weeks, some of the points he mentioned were things I noticed. One example of that is ending a sentence with “yeah”. Mr.Paterson informed us all that this habit is quite common among students, but can easily be improved with easy-to-access, advanced gadgets. It can really degrade your entire presentation, as it is meaningless and makes you appear less confident. Additionally, he gave me feedback on the actual slideshow, which had quite a lot of flaws. For one, there were sporadic white blank spaces without words on it, making the slideshow seem ununified and disorganized. As he likes to say, it’s like ketchup on sushi. It made my presentation seem far less professional, so I’d like to make sure to not make the same mistake in my future presentations. Personally, I felt that the best solution for this was to make the photo fit the entire screen so there is less to think about, and is simpler. In addition, he taught me that layering photos over one another distracts the audience as it makes them concentrate on what’s behind the top photo. He said that a good presentation would either have nothing sticking out, or have them on separate slideshows. Despite all of this, I was extremely glad to hear that my hand gestures and eye contact was done well. I did try to use hand gestures that were suited for the content at all times, so I felt very accomplished. Also, Mr.Paterson told me that my eye contact was good because I checked the audience’s expressions frequently. My practicing method was using an iPad to film myself, which helped me find my weaknesses. I then was able to overcome these by never taking my eyes off the people listening during practice presentations with my team. This seemed to have paid off.
During most of the class, however, we were provided the entire period to work on our assignment. I got pretty far in my draft, so I’d like to make sure to stay on task this week/weekend as well. Also, as I was reading through the criterion/instruction, I noticed tons of things were missing in my introduction. Because my introduction paragraph is far longer than the rest of my paragraphs, I made a note to myself to make sure to add those parts, such as the genre of the book and my final verdict on it.