Week 10 — One Idea on Screen: Design and Place Your Presentation Aid — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 9 of the term — design the one aid your next speech needs, count and redesign a crowded slide, plan how you will reveal, reference, and return it, and explain to a friend why a slide should carry one idea.

This week you learned the four functions of a presentation aid, the types of aids and the right graph for the data, the design principles and the six-by-six heuristic, and reveal, reference, return with a backup plan. In this assignment you work four short problems on the week's examples, explain each one, design the aid for a speech you will really give, and explain the idea to someone who has never taken a speaking course. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Speech Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles. It builds on Week 2's situational lens: the size, setting, and equipment of your room decide what your aid can do.

The task

This week's shared example is the running speech's aids and the crowded-slide redesign, which are illustrative and attributed to no one. Chapter 10 counts them. The crowded draft slide for the running speech's main point II holds:

• the headline "Plate waste is targeted by changing how food is served" (10 words);
• the subpoints "Trayless serving cuts how much food diners take." (8 words) and "Portion-controlled serving lowers plate waste further." (6 words); and
• the whole of the speech's second oral citation pasted underneath in small gray type (50 words).

The redesign is the running speech's bar graph alone: the headline "Plate waste by serving style" (5 words), three bars labelled Tray, Trayless, and Portion-controlled (3 words), and a small "Illustrative" tag (1 word). Chapter 10 also walks through an illustrative chatbot that, asked for a slide on main point I, returns 7 bullet lines, a pie graph of plate waste in each week of the term, the line "30–40% of all food is wasted!" with no source, and the comment "This slide looks professional and engaging!"

Work these four problems, and show how you reached each one:

1. The six-by-six heuristic allows at most 6 lines with at most 6 words a line. How many words does that ceiling allow on one slide?
2. The crowded draft slide holds a 10-word headline, subpoints of 8 and 6 words, and a pasted citation of 50 words. How many words does the slide hold in all?
3. The crowded draft slide holds 74 words, and the six-by-six ceiling is 36 words. How many words over the ceiling is the slide?
4. The crowded draft slide holds 74 words, and the redesigned bar-graph slide holds 9 words. How many fewer words are on screen after the redesign?

Beside each answer, add one brief explanation, and use your own next speech for the parts that ask for it:

• Problem 1: name the one presentation aid your own next speech needs, its type, and which of the four functions (clarity, retention, interest, credibility) it serves for that audience. Then name one fact about the room, from the situational lens, that shapes how you will build it.
• Problem 2: match the three illustrative data sets from Chapter 10 (a college budget's shares, a recycling rate over 5 years, enrollments in 5 departments) to a pie, line, or bar graph, giving the question each data set answers. Then say which graph type your own aid needs and why, or why your aid is better as another type, such as an object, a map, or a demonstration.
• Problem 3: describe in words a first draft of your own aid, count its words against the six-by-six ceiling, and name two design principles it meets or breaks; then describe your redesign and state its one idea. Then write your reveal, reference, return plan: where in the speech the aid appears, your one-sentence reference, and your one-sentence backup if the screen fails.
• Problem 4: in the illustrative chatbot slide described above (you do not need to open any tool), name its four problems (crowding, the wrong graph, a statistic with no source, and hollow praise) and the fix for each, and explain why praise for how a slide looks names none of the four functions.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your friend will give a three-minute budget update at a neighborhood association and plans to paste the whole budget spreadsheet onto one slide and read it row by row. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains, in everyday words, why one idea per slide works better for listeners; which graph fits a budget's shares and why; how to show it, point to one part, then take it down; and one limit, such as using only real, sourced numbers or treating the six-by-six heuristic as a rule of thumb. Explain any course term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible; this message is scored with Problem 4.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coworker who will give a five-minute safety update at a team meeting and plans to paste a full page of the safety manual onto one slide. Model answer: "A full page on the screen means everyone reads ahead and stops listening to you. Pick the one change people need to remember, like the new exit route, and show only that, maybe as a simple floor map. Put it up when you get to the exit route, point to the two doors in one sentence, then take it down and look at the team. Keep the manual page as a printout for anyone who wants the details, and if the projector fails, describe the route out loud."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own wording and examples.

Show how you got each answer. A reader should be able to check every total and every label without guessing which numbers you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single piece of work containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief explanation the task names for that problem;
• your own aid and its function, your graph matches, your counted draft and redesign, your reveal, reference, return plan with its backup sentence, and your critique of the chatbot slide; and
• your message to the friend, explaining in everyday words why one idea per slide works better, which graph fits a budget's shares, how to show the aid and take it down, and one limit.

Keep it to roughly one to two pages. Clear and specific beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, as a spoken explanation recorded as audio or video of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled sketch of your aid with a written description. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the counting, the designing, the explanations, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. Problem 4 asks you to critique a described, illustrative slide; you do not need to open any tool to do it. Submitting AI-generated work as your own or copying another student's work is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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