Guidelines: Seven minutes (no more, no less). This presentation should be written out in advance, practiced, and very interesting. Use notes, images, sounds, or whatever else will help you to tell an interesting story.

Your presentation needs to be INTERESTING! It should be something we want to listen to, and something that gives us (your audience) some pleasure from hearing.

What should your presentation be about? Two things:

1. The writing process: both the good and the bad. What was the research like? How did you start writing, and how did you revise? How did your focus change over time? What kinds of decisions did you wrestle with? Etc.

2. Some discussion of the topic itself. Tell us something you learned about your topic in the course of research. Since not all of your audience will read your topic all the way through, tell us a little about the topic. If it seems interesting, you might even read or show us a small excerpt of your project.

Balance these two things. Don’t necessarily emphasize one over the other. But do these two things in interesting ways. How? By being animated. Remember the anecdote? Use it!

Set the scene for us through language, images, music, whatever. Be creative. For this seven minutes, WOW us. Don’t limit yourself.

See the assigned order here:

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Hometown Badhdad

What’s the story being told in this documentary?

“Troops”

“Saif <3 Noor”

“Mentally F’ed Up”

“Market Boom“

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James Agee was writing during the 1930s, a terrible time for many Americans who depended on the earth for a living. Farmers were ruined, and families in the south turned to sharecropping in order to survive. It was a hard life—-harder than most of us could imagine. In fact, many northerners and wealthier Americans could not imagine it.

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The Arcades Project shows a method of research, writing, and thinking. Yet, none of what is here might be recognizable as “research.” Benjamin’s methodology is inventive, but it is also a very different way of thinking. (more…)