read, think, and speak

In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

From our presentations in the last two meetings, I can lists five important things:

1. Audience are too  lazy to speak, so anytime you use questions to interact with them, always use open-end questions instead of yes-no question.

Makes me think that audience are so annoying in the way they’re so easily bored, losing focus, and tend to pay attention more to presenters’s appearance than the ideas presented. But hey, I was an audience too, wasn’t I? Surely. But I can assure that I am not that annoying, really. Try me. Hahaha.

2. Try to record your performance so you can see your improvement.

I’m so, so, wanting to do this. Okay, my narcissist side wins, haha. I don’t know, maybe I will record my pretending to be announcer for Colchester local TV station (is there such thing in that dream city of mine?) someday. Secretly. In my room. Yeah, another dirty little secret

3. Try hard to hold your audience’s curiosity.

Yep. We’re bunch of curious people who read fast so it’s better to show the points one by one, dear presenter. If you show us all points in one slide, we’re gonna read them in a few seconds and our mind will then drift away to something more interesting like “I think Cedric Diggory is way much better than Edward Cullen from Stephenie Meyer’s novel Twilight” or something like that.

4. Keep the eye contact.

Yes I am talking about presenting ideas, not occlumency lesson with Severus Snape. Still, there is one similar thing. Keeping the eye contact. And just like in occlumency, for some people this is the hardest thing to do. You must have a strong self-confident. But why? Why the eye contact? Oh, I love this reason: Because you are sharing your VIEW!

5. Remember that you can get more respect and be more convincing when your grammar and language use are good ^_^

People love perfection, I guess. And when they find zero mistake, they’re gonna be like, “Oh , I can’t find mistake in her grammar. This is annoying. But (I hate to admit this) it’s cool.”

Presenting ideas was heart-throbbing. But now as we move on to essay writing, I personally think that presenting ideas wasn’t that difficult because you are more free. In the way that when you talk, only people with some kind of language gift in their heads and the ones who fully pay attention to you able to notice the grammatical errors you make. But in writing! It’s there, can be read many times and mistakes are more easily found. You just can’t escape like the way you escape from your mistakes in speaking as you say the next sentence. Kinda scary, hahaha. I think I have to read more articles in English (wishing so much that Reader’s Digest Asia is a bit cheaper, hehehe) to get accostumed with essay reading and writing. Because it is waaay different from writing freely like this.

Ah, that reminds me of Dory from Finding Nemo who loves to sing “Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.” For me now it’s more like: Just keep reading, reading, reading.. Just keep writing, writing, writing…