Eng. 8

Holper

Oral Presentations on Stories and Authors

Possible Points: 50 pts.

Rules on Points: Since you're very small groups, you will be evaluated together, which means that if one person does not do much work, the two of you will still earn the same points. This means that you'll need to encourage one another to be actively involved in this project.

Time: Presentations will be approximately 15 minutes, though they can go longer if the class is interested in discussing the story itself.

What You'll Do:

1) Choose a literary author you're interested in. Look over the Authors link on our website for ideas. Toward the bottom half of the page, there is a section entitled Other Authors to Consider for Presentations.* You may choose an author off this list or you may find another contemporary literary author you enjoy. You may choose an author we've already read, as long as it's not the story we read in class.

2) Find a story by this author you like, make a clean copy of it, and read it.

3) Do some biographical and critical response research on this author. (You might try a general search in Google.com or try the Gale Literary Database under article search in the library's website.) This will allow you to tell us something about the author's life and literary works, as well as how the critics responded to his/her writing. The presentation will be in roughly three parts:

A) The author's life: biography relevant to his/her writing.

B) The critics' response to his/her work.

C) Explication and discussion of the story itself.

4) Prepare your presentation.

A) Make sufficient copies of the story for everyone in class, including Dave. (There are eight students in class.)

B) Prepare a sentence outline of your talk and practice it together. (If you're unfamiliar with a sentence outline, there's a good example of how to do this in the Bedford Handbook on p. 28. Both people will be involved in the presentation, so divide up the work equally. You will turn in the outline (along with the story), so make sure it's neatly typed.

C) Prepare audio/visual materials, handouts, etc. for the class. This can include music, film clips, handouts, overheads, posters, food, etc. You should not simply come to class and give a talk. The more effective presentations should include a variety of stimuli that are relevant to the story. Use your imagination on how to best explain this author, his/her works, and the story itself. And most of all, have fun in teaching us about this story, the author, and the life he/she has lead.