Persuasive Presentation

Once you graduate, you will constantly have to sell yourself and your ideas to your boss, customers, and potential/current clients through oral communication. Persuasion can often come disguised as sales, and vice versa.

For this six- to seven-minute persuasive presentation, choose an organization in which you are currently involved, such as a neighborhood group, your employer, a nonprofit, your religious community, a civic group, an activist movement, sports club, etc. You must be able to includes references to credible outside sources, (at least one for each main point of your presentation) so be sure to select a speech topic that has scholarly sources written about it.

Think about some sort of change to the organization itself that you would like made or implemented. This change might be proposing an idea for a new policy, product, procedure, process, practice, etc. Alternatively, you may wish to change a current practice of the organization. This would be a real presentation that you could actually give, if you were asked. The audience for this presentation will be the members of your organization. Since you belong to this organization, you will have an established ethos.

This assignment requires that you create a formal outline. A formal outline is detailed and written in complete sentences instead of using a keyword or sentence fragment for each point.

Creating a formal outline will assist you both in developing your ideas and in following the organizational patterns that you have learned in this week’s readings and discussion forum about delivering presentations. A great presentation is well organized and easy for the listener to understand. Your audience has only one opportunity to understand the message conveyed in your presentation. It is important to have a clearly established audience for your presentation and to consistently adapt the content of your presentation for that audience.

For examples of acceptable and unacceptable ways of developing your formal outline, please review the Sample Outlines document.

Create your formal outline using the Persuasive Presentation Outline Template. The template includes all of the elements that are required for the outline.

Carefully review the Grading Rubric for the criteria that will be used to evaluate your assignment.