Writing Homework Help

Write the body of your interpretive talk. Emphasize quality over quantity. A start, two stopping stations, and an endpoint is fine for the talk as a whole if that fulfills the goal and objectives of your talk. If you need or want more stopping stations, feel free to expand. Include all stopping stations in your script for this week.

Cite your sources in text, using APA style as your guide, and also provide your full bibliographic references section. Some of these sources might be worked directly into your spoken script. For example, “Professor X learned when studying frogs just like these that endocrine disruptors are causing mutations, such as third legs.” Or, you might just use the information and not verbally reference the source. That is fine as long as you cite the source of your information in the written script you submit here. Often, sources are not verbally cited in an interpretive talk unless the source of the information is particularly interesting, advances the narrative, and/or is useful to demonstrate the validity of the information to the audience. But, remember, this is not an academic lecture. It is an educational, yet entertaining interpretation of something at your site (topic) that has broader implications (issue).

Use the same methods that you practiced the last two weeks to cite your sources explicitly in the script, as in text citations, or as footnotes. Purdue Owl is useful (Links to an external site.).

Also, write the concluding section of your interpretive talk and submit your entire script.

You will deliver your concluding section at the endpoint of your talk, the place where the entire presentation ends. Therefore, keep in mind the storytelling principles we discussed at the beginning of the semester. You need to at least partially resolve the problem, answer the question, or deal with the dilemma that you set out at the beginning. The audience has been hanging on to your every word in between in part because they want to know the answer. Better yet, they want to be part of the solution. As you considered for the respond assignment for 11/19, one of the best ways to conclude is to give your audience something to do and think about, and your work this semester around public participation has primed you to think about policy, law, community organization, and/or another concrete action that people can take to have a positive impact in relation to your issue, topic, and/or site. 

Return to the question you asked the audience at the beginning of your talk. Have you answered it yet? Possibly in the last stopping station, but probably not completely. Answer it more completely now. If it was a good question, there was not one simple answer, but several possible answers, and you have helped the audience think through the issue and come up with resolutions in their own minds. Or maybe they and you have come up with new and better questions by the end.

Sometimes a presenter can return to the initial story to wrap things up, providing the resolution that way. Often, it is best to ask the audience to offer their answers. That is more difficult in an audio tour, but not impossible. You can ask them how they would answer the question and offer alternative answers that a live audience might come up with. Again, it is best if the answer is neither simple nor obvious. For example, solving climate change, species extinction, environmental injustice, pollution, and so on, is not easy, or we would have done so. Hopefully, your talk has provided knowledge and information that people can bring to bear in solving the problem at hand.

Or, your question might have been more about the specific on site topic. That might be more resolvable, but still you should choose a problem and potential solution(s) that rise about the simple yes/no or fill in the blank “correct” answer. Make your audience think. Get them involved in the collective problem solving so that the information you provide has a context and meaning. The goal is not to show them what you know, and fill them with that knowledge (the “banking” model of education), but rather to get them actively involved in learning, discovery, and problem solving. And, remember, the more you use your site as your learning lab, the more that people can use the on-site features referenced in your talk to come up with their own perspectives on the problem. Leave them thinking.

It could also be good to leave your audience with a takeaway, something that keeps them thinking and transforms this temporary experience into more permanent learning. That might be a relevant joke, a great quote, or something else that ties it all together.