The Bedford Researcher: Chapter 19 Summary and Discussion

Chapter 19 in The Bedford Researcher reviews the different ways to write a document or craft a presentation. The section of this chapter that is most applicable to our course is the section on academic essays. Expressing an idea or argument can be done in a multitude of ways but the academic essay is the most common way for students to get a handle on the core components of a written composition piece. Page 299 includes a checklist for the basic elements of an academic essay and section 19b reviews the outline of a multimodal essay. Subsequent sections include ways to design articles, web sites, oral presentations, multimedia presentations, and poster presentations.

The section that reviews academic essays is the most relevant part of chapter 19. The remaining sections have a lot of great information but aren’t useful for the purposes of this particular course. Having done many oral presentations with the aid of PowerPoint, I can say that the oral presentation section is really helpful and covers a lot of the mistakes most people first make when giving an oral presentation. Most college students may not be creating their own web sites for a typical class but, because oral presentations are becoming more common, it is likely that oral presentations will be required at some point in one’s college or professional career.