Group Special Occasion Assignment

The purpose of this assignment is to give students a chance to combine learning about small group communication with extemporaneous speaking in organizations related to special occasions.

Your assignment is to develop a 10-12 minute presentation with your group of four to five other students in a small group to be assigned by your graduate assistant. The presentation should be structured around a hypothetical situation in a business or professional setting. Each member of your group is required to speak for approximately 2 minutes each. It is important that you coordinate your presentations so that you each play a different role and cover different content. For instance, groups in the past have used some of the following scenarios:

You may make up the company or organization for the purposes of the presentation or you may situate your presentation in an actual company and play the role of actual people (ie. Bill Gates speaking at the roll out of Office 2000). Understand however, that if you do play the role of an actual person, you are constrained by the previous rhetorical offerings of that person, their credibility, and how they would react in that situation.

You will be graded on how well your presentations exhibit an understanding of the context and rhetorical situation that you are creating. You will also be graded on the degree to which your group’s presentation reflects the planning and coordination necessary for an acceptable presentation. Finally, you will be graded on the quality of your extemporaneous speech---content, delivery, and organization.

Finally, have fun with this assignment, but take seriously the job of coordinating the roles for each speaker and how they fit together.

This assignment is worth 25 points toward your final grade.