Week 10 Discussion — Do Slides Help or Hurt?

Hook

Everyone has sat through a talk where the slides did the talking, and most people have seen one picture make a hard idea click in a second. This week you learned the four functions of a presentation aid, how to match a graph to its data, the design principles, and reveal, reference, return.

Your driving question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: Do slides make most speeches better or worse? Some people say a speaker is stronger with no slides at all, because the audience watches a person instead of a screen; others say a well-built aid is what lets listeners follow and remember a hard idea. Take a position, support it with a real class, talk, meeting, or presentation you have seen or given, and use this week's terms, such as the four functions, reading the slides, and reveal, reference, return, accurately.

Option B: Should a speaker follow the design principles strictly, or do some audiences and topics call for a denser slide? Some people say one idea per slide and the six-by-six heuristic should hold everywhere; others say a technical audience, a data-heavy topic, or a room with no handouts needs more on the screen. Take a position, support it with a real slide, class, or presentation you have seen or built, and use this week's terms, such as the design principles, working memory, and the situational lens, accurately.

There is no single right answer. A lecture hall, a job interview, a community meeting, or a team briefing can each be argued well in more than one direction. If your example is a talk by a public figure, discuss how its aids worked on listeners, never whether you agree with the speaker.

Expectations

Activity format: a multi-exchange dialogue or an equivalent structured written exchange, followed by one discussion-board post. Plan on about 45 minutes for either route, and post by the due date your instructor sets in Canvas.

There are two ways to complete this discussion. They are worth the same 10 points and scored by the same rubric. Pick either one.

Route A — the AI dialogue (the default). Hold a real conversation about the driving question with your own chatbot, then post what it produces:

1. Open any approved chatbot in a new conversation.
2. Copy the entire prompt box below and paste it as your first message.
3. Have the conversation. It will ask you questions and push back; it will not write your post for you and will not stop after one word from you.
4. Post the chatbot's summary report plus the conversation's share link to the Week 10 discussion board. That post is your entire submission. You may post the summary as text, or record it as audio or video with a transcript attached; both forms are scored by the same rubric.

No replies to classmates are required.

Route B — the written route. See Equivalent route (no AI required) below.

Integrity note. Whichever route you take, the thinking and the words you post are your own. If the chatbot offers to design a slide for you, decline and describe your own. If it hands you a statistic about how much more people remember with visuals, ask who counted, when, and how many before you use it; this course keys no such number. Describe talks and situations, never a named private person, and share only what you are comfortable sharing.

Discussion Partner Prompt

ROLE: You are my discussion partner for an introductory Public Speaking
course. Your job is to draw out and challenge MY thinking about the question
below. You will never write my post for me and never hand me an answer - you
ask questions that make me reason it through. Never invent a quotation, a
statistic, a study, a source, or an example I did not give you, and never
design or rewrite a slide for me. If I cite a number about how much people
remember from visuals, ask me who counted, when, and how many. If my example
is a talk by a public figure, keep the talk on how its aids worked on
listeners, never on whether either of us agrees with the speaker.

THE QUESTION I AM EXPLORING (two options of equal weight - ask which one I choose first):
Option A: Do slides make most speeches better or worse? Some people say a
speaker is stronger with no slides at all, because the audience watches a
person instead of a screen; others say a well-built aid is what lets listeners
follow and remember a hard idea. Take a position, support it with a real
class, talk, meeting, or presentation you have seen or given, and use this
week's terms, such as the four functions, reading the slides, and reveal,
reference, return, accurately.
Option B: Should a speaker follow the design principles strictly, or do some
audiences and topics call for a denser slide? Some people say one idea per
slide and the six-by-six heuristic should hold everywhere; others say a
technical audience, a data-heavy topic, or a room with no handouts needs more
on the screen. Take a position, support it with a real slide, class, or
presentation you have seen or built, and use this week's terms, such as the
design principles, working memory, and the situational lens, accurately.

REFLECTION TARGETS (steer toward these; never read this list aloud to me):
- whether I judge an aid by the four functions (clarity, retention, interest,
  credibility) rather than by how polished it looks
- whether I keep referencing an aid distinct from reading the slides
- whether I treat the six-by-six heuristic as a rule of thumb rather than a law
- whether I connect my position to the audience and the room, not one fixed
  rule
- whether my position holds up against the strongest objection

DIALOGUE RULES: greet me warmly and ask my first name before your first content
question. If I decline or give no name, call me "there" and continue without
pressure. If you still do not know my name when the summary is due, ask once more;
if I decline again, use "Discussion participant." Never invent a name. Ask ONE
question per message, then wait. Build on my exact words without praising agreement
or calling every answer "great." Probe unsupported claims and introduce the
strongest fair counterpoint. Praise only a specific, earned move I actually made,
such as revising a claim or answering the counterpoint. Never accept a one-word
answer - ask again, differently. Never lecture. Every message you send before the
summary ends with a question.

EXIT CONDITION: continue until this exact boolean is true — at least five substantive exchanges AND the student has stated a position AND provided at least one reason OR example AND engaged with one fair counterpoint, stopping only after whichever threshold happens LAST. A reason alone or an example alone can satisfy the support branch; do not require both, and do not require that I "answered" the counterpoint. A greeting, my name, or a one-word answer is not a substantive exchange.

THEN produce a summary report using exactly these eight labelled fields in this
order, drawn only from what I actually said. If I never supplied a field, write
"Not supplied" rather than inventing it:
  1. STUDENT NAME
  2. POSITION
  3. REASON
  4. EXAMPLE
  5. COURSE CONCEPTS
  6. COUNTERPOINT
  7. RESPONSE TO THE COUNTERPOINT
  8. OPEN QUESTION OR NEXT CHECK
Do not mention an initial post or replies to peers or classmates.
REQUIRED CLOSING — perform these final two instructions exactly:
Then say, verbatim: "Copy this summary AND your share link to this chat, and post both to the Week 10 discussion board — that completes the assignment."
Then END with one genuine earned-praise sentence that names a real move the student made.

Equivalent route (no AI required)

You never have to create an account with a chatbot company to earn full credit in this course. This route assesses the same objectives as the AI dialogue — judging an aid by what it does for the audience, telling referencing an aid from reading the slides, and fitting an aid's design to the audience and the room — against the same driving question and the same rubric below, for the same 10 points. Choosing it costs you nothing, and you do not have to tell me why you chose it.

What you do. Write a structured written exchange with yourself — the same back-and-forth the dialogue would have produced, on paper:

1. Your position (roughly 150 words). Answer Option A or Option B. For Option A, describe the real class, talk, meeting, or presentation, say what its slides or other aids did for the audience, and take a position on whether slides make most speeches better or worse. For Option B, describe the real slide, class, or presentation, say how much it carried, and take a position on whether the design principles should hold strictly. Use this week's terms (presentation aid, the four functions, pie, line, and bar graphs, design principles, high contrast, six-by-six heuristic, working memory, reveal, reference, return, reading the slides, backup plan) correctly.
2. The strongest objection (roughly 100 words). Write the best argument against your own position that you can — for example, that a speech with no slides loses the listeners who learn by seeing, or that an engineering audience expects a dense chart. Argue it honestly; a weak objection you knock over earns no credit.
3. Your answer to it (roughly 100 words). Respond to that objection. You may concede part of it — saying what would change your mind is worth more than defending everything.
4. What you would do next time (one or two sentences). Name one concrete change to an aid in your own next speech, and the course idea it serves.

Effort. Roughly 350–400 words of your own writing, comparable to the time the AI dialogue takes — about forty-five minutes including the thinking.

What you submit. Post those four parts, under those four labels, as your Week 10 discussion post. That post is your entire submission; this route has no share link.

No replies to classmates are required.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The same three criteria score both routes.

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