Record a Formal Presentation

Identify, research, and record a formal presentation to the class of a text (article, chapter, or book) that provides background, history, and definitions of business, professional or technical writing or communication as a practice and/or field of study.

I can provide suggested articles, books, and chapters, or you may research to find something you’d be interested in presenting. Your goal is to identify what the text says about the field of business or technical and professional writing or communication and to share this with your classmates. Present your findings professionally and clearly, avoiding academic jargon to the extent possible. Your presentation should last about 5 minutes and should provide a clear summary of the text’s purpose and argument.

Your goal is to provide your classmates with information about the history, current conditions, future predictions, or other information about the field of technical communication. Most useful to everyone will be tying field information to a career or professional setting; for example, addressing ways that technical communication intersects with the field and practice of HR management.

The following are the common journals used in business, technical, and professional writing and communication. There are many more options available, and you are welcome to consult a UR Library Liaison and the Rhetoric and Communication Studies LibGuide to discover additional resources.

• Technical Communication: Journal of the Society for Technical Communication
• Technical Communication Quarterly: Journal of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing
• Journal of Business & Technical Communication
• Business and Professional Communication Quarterly
• IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication: Journal of the Professional Communication Society of the IEEE*
• International Journal of Business Communication: Journal of the Association for Business Communication
• Communication Design Quarterly: Journal of ACM SIGDOC*

* We have limited or no access to these journals via the UR Library, but you may request specific articles via interlibrary loan (ILLiad).

Submission Instructions

Prepare a professional slide deck for your presentation. Be sure cite your resource and additional research required for the presentation. Consult the following for guidelines and best practices:

• Open Technical Communication 2.12 Oral Presentations
• Professional Communication Presentation Module
• Prepare a script for your presentation to go with your slides.

Record your presentation as a narrated slideshow in a tool like Microsoft Powerpoint, Apple Keynote, or Google Slides. Consult the following for guidelines and best practices:

• How to Give a Killer Presentation
• What It Takes to Give a Great Presentation
• The Best Way to Record a Powerpoint Presentation

Use software of your choice to record and convert the narrated presentation to a video format (generally .mov or .mp4).

Upload as an unlisted video on YouTube (or a cloud-based video sharing service of your choice). The goal is to allow only people with a link to the video to view it.

Get an embed link from the video sharing site, then embed the video in a post that introduces the resource you’re sharing and provides a brief written summary of your presentation. In the text of the post, be sure to provide an APA citation of the resource along with a permalink (if available) to the PDF or web version.

• Add “Presentation” as the category
• Include tags that describe the resource

Assignment Overview