Senior Project Reflection and Presentation Preparation

Hi all,

This is the last blog post for my senior project—thank you to everyone who’s been reading/following it. I’ve been doing a lot of independent readings over the past couple of weeks to strengthen any points regarding specific rhetorical techniques that I’ve introduced throughout my project.

Rather than focusing on those similar articles and talking about the same techniques, ranging from authenticity to emphatic words to even sentence structure, I took a lot of time this week in trying to organize my senior presentation.

While I have yet to finish my powerpoint presentation, I was very jumbled on the aspect on how to actually present all of this information. Sure, it may seem structured in a blog post version, but putting it out in speech/presentation from is a whole lot different.

“Should I structure from beginning, middle, and end of my senior project?,” “how about making the three presidential debates as one big umbrella and branching out,” “importance of techniques?” “order of importance?,” “where do I add the videos to my presentation?,” were some questions that buzzed in my head.

But, with careful planning, I’ve come up with a rough idea of what I’d like to do. ON the side note, the videos haven’t been going too well as movie editing is not my forte. I’ve come across a lot of troubles in trying to structure the mini-episodes (primarily focusing on word choice+sentence formation level and discourse markers/authenticity). I’m still working on the videos at the moment, but reflecting on my progress—it is pretty slow as I do have to look up each and every word, example, thought process that I want to present on the “factba.se” website, and then accumulating all those videos where he said them and transferring it into a coherent, fast-paced video of my own.

Video editing is pretty difficult for me (even with prior experience) because cutting and adding special effects can take quite a lot of time—plus with my topic, I’m essentially trying to find as many examples of Trump’s specific techniques and compiling it into one. Though hopefully, they will be in clean-cut condition for the actual presentation.

Without further ado, the actual structure of the presentation will be centered on the main types of rhetoric that I particularly think are strong and have been mentioned multiple times in my posts. I will focus on three (it might change for the real thing), but those are word choice and sentence structure, rhetorical message tactics (which may include the emotional tone and clout aspect as well), and authenticity/discourse markers. I want to start off my presentation by showing an eye-catching video of Trump speaking and asking a hypophora to the audience on what stood out the most (essentially leading into a specific rhetorical technique). Of course, introductions will include general knowledge of what the purpose of rhetoric is, the presidential trends behind it, and the main themes to both Clinton’s and Trumps campaigns.

Ideally, I would have a video for each big technique that I will transition to throughout my presentation, and I might add a couple of other videos that other researchers have made to further emphasize my point or add another perspective (depending on the timing). This even includes LIWC program that pretty much helped gear a lot of my research to where it is now.

Also, I have made physical spot in my presentation to address the “outliers” of my research—claims that show Trump’s language is ineffective and how it was just Clinton’s campaign that failed.

Lastly, from the beginning of my presentation, I’m going to lead in to how my research is different from others because my topic has been thoroughly studied by many.

Though all these questions will be answered in my actual presentation, so please don’t forget to come check it out!

Furthermore, I wanted to reflect on my senior research project as a whole. I entered this project after my previous idea seemed a bit impossible with the very few resources available to me. My original plans for this project was much more simpler—just talking about possibly cool, intriguing, yet effective techniques that Trump used to win the presidential campaign and just backing up those claims with academic, reliable articles. But once I dived in, it progressed to a different direction as I learned that there was so much to just “specific techniques.” Sometimes, there were aspects of Trump’s language that affected one another; sometimes it was as simple as a “technique;” sometimes it had to do with reoccurring messages/themes. A highly diverse rhetoric that is quite impossible to explain everything in one presentation, so I had to find things that related to each other and narrow down my variables (from big speeches to interviews or even from grammar or punctuation to just words).

I’ve learned a lot during my research and how to effectively present different things, yet with a similar topic—I didn’t want to just post things that showed maybe how Trump’s use of insults during campaigns were effective. I needed to prove that same thing in the same presidential debates that he took part with Clinton.

Overall, because my topic had so much information out there that varied from one spectrum to the other, it was a little difficult to remain focused on one particular theme—which made it even more difficult to structure when presenting what I essentially looked at.

Anyway, please look forward to my senior project night and will be doing all final touches leading to the day.

Thanks for reading,

Gina