10.3 Importance of Oral Presentations

In the workplace and during your university career, you will likely be asked to give oral presentations. An oral presentation is a key persuasive tool. For example, if you work in marketing, you will often be asked to “pitch” campaigns to clients. Even though these pitches could happen over email, the face-to-face element allows marketers to connect with the client, respond to questions, demonstrate their knowledge and bring their ideas to life through storytelling. In this section, we’ll focus on public speaking. While this section focuses on public speaking advocacy, you can bring these tools to everything from a meeting where you’re telling your colleagues about the results of a project to a keynote speech at a conference.

Now imagine your favourite public speaker. Who comes to mind? A famous comedian like Jen Kirkman? An Activist? What makes them memorable for you? Were they funny? Relatable? Dynamic? Confident? Try to think beyond what they said to how they made you feel. What they said undoubtedly matters, but we are often less inclined to remember the what without a powerful how— how they delivered their message, how their performance implicated us or called us in; how they made us feel or how they asked us to think or act differently.

In this chapter, we introduce public speaking by exploring what it is and why it’s impactful as a communication process. Specifically, we invite you to consider public speaking as advocacy. When you select information to share with others, you are advocating for the necessity of that information to be heard. You are calling on the audience and calling them in to listen to your perspective.

Attribution

“Importance of Oral Presentations” from Business Writing For Everyone by Arley Cruthers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.