I had my English - sorry, my Rhetoric of Fiction - class presentation today. It was supposed to be a fifteen to twenty minute examination of one rhetorical element within a short story, drawing on the text itself, our secondary theoretical sources (ie, the two course textbooks), and any additional scholarly criticism we felt like dragging in. By luck of the draw, my presentation date was November 7, my element for analysis was authorship, and the text I chose was Mark Twain's first popular short story, "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."
So, I sat down at my computer this morning at about 11am, and started researching and writing the material for the presentation. Well, I alternated between that and watching Top Gear clips on Youtube. Then I made myself a nice sandwich, pastrami on marble rye with sliced tomato. Then I got up and wandered around a bit, checked the mail downstairs, wrote a little more, assembled a ridiculous little plastic anti-aircraft gun, did a bit more research, revised the main direction of my argument, changed my shirt, wrote another page, called Caspian, hit print, then grabbed my presentation notes (two copies, one in MLA format with full references for the prof to mark, the other just the text in 13 point font at 1.5 spacing for me to read from) and was out the door at 4pm for my first class.
The presentation went very well, of course. Mine always do, and I say that with no arrogance intended. Giving class presentations seems to be the thing in the world I am least suited for: I'm an introvert to a crippling degree, I procrastinate, my research is seldom as thorough as it ought to be, and I am not an outwardly charismatic person. But I am absolutely great at presentations. I use humour often and well, I make eye contact with everyone, I speak and move in an animated manner, and my presentation itself is always smooth and logically organized and completely devoid of any "um, uh, so... where was I?" moments. I'm calm, I'm collected, I'm amused, I adapt easily to unexpected questions or events. Put me in a party with twenty of my supposed peers, and I will hide in the corner nursing a Diet Coke until I can leave. Put me behind a podium in front of them, and I'm completely comfortable.
There's no trick to it. I really don't have any explanation for why I do so well at public speaking of any sort. I don't picture the audience naked to relax my nerves, I don't memorize a speech word for word - my presentation notes are my speech, I just write out exactly what I plan on saying, read it over a couple of times to get the gist, then I keep the notes in front of me and glance at them every paragraph or so to remind myself of my next point. I improvise, too, adding in examples if I think of them, or expanding on a point if the class is looking glassy-eyed after what I thought was a perfectly clear explanation.
But the really neat thing about tonight's presentation, as far as I'm concerned, was this:
I don't know anyone in my English class. At all. None of my fellow Georgian transfer students are there, all of them have just been at Laurentian with each other for the past three and a half years. I think only one of them knows my name, and that's only because I sit beside her and we've talked online briefly.
But after my presentation, four separate people came up to me and complimented me on it. They said it was great, I was funny, I should be an English prof, they really enjoyed it. These are people who don't know me as anything other than the quiet one who sits up at the front, but after my presentation, they approached me privately and gave me honest, unsolicited praise.
That's pretty awesome, I think. I think I derive more pride from that than I do from any given essay mark. Writing a good essay is really just paint by numbers, filling in the blanks of the thesis and the main arguments. Being able to keep people entertained during a twenty minute discussion of authorial rhetoric, though... that's something special.