So, perhaps the biggest problem with presenting information is getting lost in the details. And so, what I'd like to do is spend a little bit of time talking about which details you might choose to include, and how you're going to maybe talk about them. So, what we're going to do in this video is talk about just some general reminders to help your discussion of your support, you know, help your evidence stay on point. So, how do we do this? Well, first, I think you still want to approach your informative ideas as claims meriting support. So here, you might want to jump back to that model of argument we discussed in the first course of this specialization. Now remember, an argument functionally needs a claim, support and warrant. Now, the claim is the assertion that you want the audience to take as valid. Then that support is the evidence and the details that you're using to validate and illustrate that claim. And then finally, that warrant is what links the support with the claim. So even when we're speaking on matters of fact, when we're presenting information, these are still arguments, right? An argument just isn't argumentativeness, it's a way of thinking about how to understand ideas. And in fact, the outlines we've been working on kind of set you up for this. Okay, let me show you an example of this. So here's a talk I did a while back, I was asked to come in and address a school. And what the context for this was is they were getting ready to do a big meeting about budget priorities for the next year. And they had asked me to present the key issues that were going to be discussed. So basically, I was doing sort of a keynote for their weeklong meeting. Now, this dealt with graduate education, I do a lot of education stuff. And you can see here there were six major issues that were going to be discussed, going to be debated, determined in that weeklong meeting. Now, each one of these ideas is a claim. It's the big idea, it's the thing I want people to remember. And each one of those claims needed support, it needed elaboration, details, illustration. As we look at all these types of support, I basically look at it in terms of shows and proves. So, there's support that shows. So, these are details and evidence that can help the audience better understand an idea, or better picture it in their heads. And then we've got support that proves. So, I want to make sure that maybe the harder-to-believe ideas are clearly and well supported. Now, both of these, I would say, are sort of varying standards of the same idea, they're both about clarification. But they can also call upon an understanding of the audience. What's going to be difficult for that audience to understand? Well, if you know that, that calls for support that shows. You need examples, analogies, so on, so forth. What about knowing your audience? What are going to be some claims that maybe are going to be more difficult to swallow? Well, obviously, that calls for support that proves. So testimonies, statistics, facts, so on and so forth. So in general, you want a balance of showing and proving. Now, depending on what you're speaking on, you're probably going to skew one way or the other. A budget update is going to skew statistics. But you just need to know that, and then include lots of showing support, so, examples and illustrations. If you're doing an overview for your office of a new program, well, that's probably going to be a lot of description. Okay, well then, maybe think about that and you include some numbers and facts in there to sort of show the legitimacy of the program. So that's some proving support. Regardless, remember that you want to keep the support in its place. It's there to support the claim. We want people to remember the takeaway, and that it was explained well. And what that means is that the language of that claim provides the grounding for that chunk of talk. So let's go back to that earlier example. Here's a single main point from that education talk. So this is me, talking about the changes in American graduate education, and specifically, in this point, around mentoring and development. So you can see here, each subpoint has some proving and showing evidence. So there were some surveys that went out to around the school. And over half of the people surveyed wanted to put more into faculty mentoring, more work into faculty mentoring. And so I bounced off this, a specific example of this particular school doing just that. You can see here, I had another point about the faculty heads talking about the need for professional development. So I reported on that survey, and then I mentioned some of what they actually said. So I was trying to include some testimony there. So, then again, I bounced that off another example of where the school program did exactly that. So, in this speech and all speeches, I want support diversity in those points. Okay, so that leaves us in this video with sort of a general approach to approaching support in your presentations. But it raises a few questions, raises a few issues. I see great outlines all the time. But they still end up being boring, or confusing or something like that. What's going wrong there? Well, typically, what's going wrong is one of three things. Usually, a mixture of all three. One, the speaker doesn't include enough good examples and illustrations, and without these, the audience cannot really understand or picture the ideas. Beyond that, maybe the speaker doesn't summarize their content well for oral performance. So, maybe they go off on a tangent or they get lost in the data or something like that. And then, the other thing that sometimes happens is speakers sort of discuss their support too densely. It's just there's too much tightly going on there and it's hard for an audience to follow. Well, these three challenges, we're going to pick up in each one of the next three videos. [MUSIC]
