Oral Presentation

Oral presentation is my favorite. I know many people get stage fright, or just don't like talking in front of people, but I really don't have a problem with it. I've always enjoyed talking to small or large groups of people, being outgoing and meeting new people. I think one of the reasons I've always liked speaking out aloud is because of the classes I've taken. At Edison Community College I took a speech class to better improve my speech giving techniques and strengthen what I already knew. In the class we had to present impromptu speeches in which the professor would hand everyone an index card with a random topic and we would have to get up in front of the class and talk for 5 minutes about it. This technique helped a lot I think. We also had to present 3 main speeches, one informative and two persuasive. The persuasive speeches are kind of like what we are trying to do now in this class with paper 3. We had to choose a topic we knew a lot about or liked to talk about and try and persuade the listeners why our topic what the right or better one. I think the skills I learned will not only be advantageous to me in this class, but also in future classes or life scenarios.

Make Sure You Revise!

The section we had to read for tonight was about finishing up an argumentative paper, concluding and revising it. When you conclude your argumentative paper, you need to make sure that all the sources, opinions and examples you used strengthened and backed up your thesis statement. You need to make sure that everything you included positively helps the argument your trying to make.
As for revising, you need to make sure there are no grammatical errors and read your paper aloud to yourself to make sure that there are no flaws or holes in your logic and sentences. As in a song, you should hear when there is an error in your work. Another thing to check for when your revising would be things like run-on sentences or any other type of "fluff." The sentences, ideas or phrases just take up space and do no good in helping out in the strengthening of your argument. These tips should definately help us greatly in writing our own argumentative papers.

Evaluating a Web Site

I think a web site is one of the easiest types of resources to evaluate. You can usually tell right off the bat if the web site is going to be accurate, objective, current and well covered. From the home page, you can often tell if the web site is going to hold water. If it is a good source, it is most likely going to have a link or picture towards the bottom of the page of the company or center that copywrited or is in charge of the site. And from there you can usually find out if the site has proper authority behind it and is a good source to use. If you don't see any of these things on the page, chances are the site isn't going to be a good source to use for a paper or whatever you may be researching for.
Also, if the web site is a good one, there are going to be many links and other things to click on so you can explore the site, or a sister one, that is going to lead you to all the information your going to need for your research.
I think evaluating a web site is much easier than evaluating any other type of source, because usually the criteria you are looking for in a valid source are right there in front of you.