11-17 November Reflections

Last week’s readings included the Cho article and a PowerPoint on the Rhetoric of PowerPoint. Plus, we performed an activity on visuals for PowerPoint.

The Cho articles discusses the ways in which corporations communicate their social responsibility activities to the public. I learned that corporations view their social responsibilities as part of their reason d’etre in addition to making profit. Communicating their social activities would not seem to be problematic: Who wouldn’t appreciate someone doing something noble? It appears that it is not always the case. Public is generally suspicious of corporations doing charity work, it smacks of hypocrisy to them. Hence, corporations have to take into account the public sentiment and, for example, not to talk too much about their social responsibility actions on, say, Facebook, to avoid drawing criticism for something good they finally do. This only stresses the importance of taking into account the rhetorical situation when engaging in any kind of communication. I wish I could read something about how to analyze this kind of things when examining a rhetorical situation.

I find the PowerPoint on the Rhetoric of PowerPoint extremely helpful. Although it would seem that after reading instructions on the rhetoric of a PPT presentation for a zillionth time the subject should have lost any appeal to you, there is no such a thing as too much pointing out the importance of designing a powerful PowerPoint presentation in the right way. Time and again, when I try to create a PowerPoint for work, I have to go back to the basics. So, thank you ,EGNL435W!

The activity on the visuals of PowerPoint was also helpful, as it gave us a chance to try and put what we learned about the rhetoric of PowerPoint to practice. It couldn’t come too soon either considering that we are supposed to design a PPT presentation for our emergency plan project. I, for one, well use a slide master to do the visuals for our presentation because it makes the whole presentation look neat, uniform, and professional.