Self-Staging: Oral Communication in Everyday Life

Self-Staging: Oral Communication in Everyday Life Two-Minute Recitation Assignment (15% of semester grade!)

This assignment is the culmination of sustained practice over the next sixteen weeks in all the elements of presentation that we’ll have been practicing all semester, including presentation posture, diction, projection, subtext, thinking clearly under pressure, and connecting with your audience.

Choose a selection of canonical prose or poetry that is so significant to you that you’re willing to commit it to memory…it may be a poem or excerpt from a poem, an excerpt from a speech, a play, a novel, a passage from a sacred text— whatever your choice, please make sure it’s very meaningful and inspirational to extent that you’ll be happy to have it in your long-term memory, perhaps for the rest of your life.

In an academic sense, the "canon" means the collection of great works of literature...the "best" or "most important" or "most representative" works which anchor the study of English and American literature. You may also choose English translations from canonical texts from great world literature, such as a passage from The Epic of Gilgamesh, Plato, Hesiod, Ovid, Confucius, Voltaire, etc.

Rule of thumb: your selection should provide some kind of profound insight into the human condition. It can be serious or comedic, but it must be edifying. Profound, even!

Read a few possible selections aloud and time them; the two-minute constraint is a mandatory requirement. I’d suggest you get started right away in finding just the right selection, and begin writing your proposal, which must include:

1. MLA-formatted formal writing

2. A copy of your selection

3. A short contextual paragraph explaining briefly how your selection fulfils the above requirements, and why it’s worth committing to memory and reciting to everyone else. In other words, how is this selection inspirational or edifying for you?

You are welcome to submit your proposal early (I encourage you to do so!), but check your syllabus for the deadline. If you have any questions, please ask me in class as soon as you’d like.