Group 4 Presentation Description

One of the previous assignment in class was to pick a topic and prepare a presentation as a group. Our group, group 4, chose to present on "Writing a business letter or memo". So we made some research on the topic and decided to divide it in three(3) parts, since we were three(3) in the group, so that each one of us would have a specific part to talk about. We finally presented the topic last week and notice there are rooms for improvement. This assignment is in fact a critique of our presentation.

First of all, we want to notify that we had a hard time finding a topic that actually suited us, since we had three different topics on the "Leo Topic Assignment". But we finally came out with this topic that we found close enough to our individual topics, and pretty interesting because people are going to graduate and write letter for employment, internship or scholarship for both undergraduate and graduate student. So we divided the work in three parts that were:

• How to write a business letter, presented by Elena Galkina
• How to write a business memo, presented by Jonathan Ouedraogo (which is me)
• Difference between a letter and a memo, presented by Zhang, Yiming

That is how we divided the work. The actual in-class presentation did not go as well as it should, because there was a lot of reading instead of explanations.  We found out later that, first, we didn't actually prepare the presentation as a group. We individually worked on our specific part and later combined them together. We did not gather before the presentation to try to rehearse it before so that we get ready. Also there was a lot of reading because we did not read our part to get familiar with it before the presentation. Another reason was that we put too much information in the presentation instead of giving bullet points and expand on them orally. Also every body in the group was not familiar withe tool we used for our presentation.

To present our work we used a tool called "prezi", that you can find here, which is not a popular tool. It's an online presentation software that has quiet a variety of displays and backgrounds. Elena and I try to talk about it but we did not include Yiming in the discussion, so he was not informed that we were going to use it. And was left in charge of making the presentation on "prezi". So the lack of communication caused a lot of misunderstanding in the group. So we learned quiet out of our mistakes. So the next presentations to come we now know that we have to:

• Make outlines in our presentation which helps get an idea and follow step by step;
• Give the information short and clear;
• Think about your audience that they won't fall asleep;
• Be prepared for the presentation;
• Avoid plagiarism. (Don't forget to use quotation marks when you are using someone else's work and always cite it as reference)
• Also, we have to remember that our presentation should always has introduction, body and conclusion. http://elenaen191f12s28.blogspot.com/

There is what came out after reviewing the way our presentation went. I hope my partners and I would learn from this and improve for future purposes.