Hist 3133

Paper Presentation Guidelines

You will present your research on April 19 or April 26.

Be prepared to speak for about 10 minutes and to answer questions for an additional 5-10 minutes.

Your paper need not be in its final form for you to present your work.  You should be at the stage where you can articulate your argument and describe your major primary sources, but you may find that the experience of saying your argument out loud and replying to questions about your work results in changes to your project.

The key elements of a presentation are:

Introduction

1) laying out the question(s) you hope to answer

2) noting what other authors have said about the subject

3) describing the primary sources you used and the way you used them

4) clearly articulating your argument, which will, ideally, be an answer to your earlier questions

Body

5) presenting your evidence, especially quotes from primary sources.  Your presentation will be stronger if you don’t rely too heavily on secondary accounts.  This section should make up the bulk of your presentation

Conclusion

6) repeating your argument and showing how it is based on the primary sources you’ve quoted