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Chris (Xun) Wang

Dr. Erin McLaughlin


Writing and Rhetoric 13300
9 December 2014
TED Talk Adventure: Challenging, but Enjoyable
Honestly, I have never done a presentation for over five minutes until this time.
Indeed, I have learned something new through this assignment. In terms of the preparation, I
first needed to decide a topic that I am truly interested in. Instantly, I thought about my
research topic: Chinese Symbolism and Taoism. From a very young age, because of
popularity of history dramas in China, I started to have a huge interest in Chinese history and
Chinese culture. This time, I only spent few seconds to decide my topic. Afterwards, I began
forming my outline, writing down main ideas and keywords for each section of the talk.
Assigning different amounts of time to each section, to meet the requirement, I cut out less
important points. With a prepared outline, I utilized Prezi to build my visual materials. The
way I designed Prezi was to put only keywords in each slide, and then added pictures that
matched my statement in the next slides. I added the citation near the picture just in case I
forgot them later.
After I finished my Prezi, I started my first draft of my talk. Instead of writing out
my draft in a document, I played my Prezi and drafted my talk verbally. To be specific, I did
not have a fixed word-by-word draft, but a draft that only involved fixed major keywords
inside. Basically, I arranged keywords in sentences and talked about my ideas without much
planning. I believed that this strategy made my talk more conversational. I practiced my talk
few times in front of my friends, asking them for advice. Afterwards, I polished my talk. One
of my friends, Christine, a Senior at Notre Dame, gave me really practical and useful advice.
She suggested me to add a slide describing my main argument, and provided a road map in

the next slide to give audiences an overview of my talk. Following her other suggestions, I
put more quotes in my talk as evidence to my claim that Taoism has largely influenced
Chinese symbolism both in color and pattern symbolism. I also decided to add more pictures
because I understand that my audiences are unfamiliar with my information. Visual proofs
can give them a better sense of Chinese symbolism and their real-life utilization. After I
finalized my Prezi, I practiced my talk several times more. I noticed that one problem was
that I spent nearly the entire ten minutes, due to the extra slides with the argument and the
road map. To overcome this problem, I made my talk more concise, using only necessary
sentences to cover my ideas. In addition, I cut down some unnecessary parts that thoroughly
describe the picture. After that revision, I only used one short sentence to cover each of the
pictures.
During the actual performance, I believed that I did fine. Because I was a little bit
nervous, I skipped some parts unintentionally. Therefore, I was actually in the expected time
range. During the talk, I intentionally moved around a little bit, utilizing some gestures to be
as natural as possible. I also used the laser to point out specific parts of the picture. The
biggest problem of my talk is that I spoke a little bit too fast, that makes my sentences
confusing sometimes. Also, I was nervous, so I did not pronounce some words clearly and
correctly, and few sentences might not make sense. Next time, if I will give a presentation, I
will speak more slowly. Additionally, I will spend more time to illustrate my points, and
make more analogy, since my audiences are totally unfamiliar with my topic. Overall,
through the multimedia projects process, I have indeed learnt how to plan a presentation, and
realize some of my weaknesses. Most importantly, I become more confident of doing a
presentation in English now.

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