MMA – Power Punching your Presentations

The Oral Communication Committee offered a series of four workshops on presentation skills. We based our content on ideas derived from multimodal analysis, (Kress, 2009) in which messages may be made more powerful or impactful by aligning the different ways meaning is made in a message. Messages or presentations could be more persuasive if they are constructed so that words, visuals, voice and nonverbal communication work together to pack a punch. Our four workshops could be taken as stand-alone to work on targeted areas, or participants could take the whole series. Vacancies were filled up within a few hours of the announcement being made and the average attendance was 20 participants per workshop.

We played on the pun in MMA which most people would connect with mixed martial arts but by which we meant multimodal analysis, to underscore how points could be punched in presentations. The series was therefore announced under the umbrella title of “MMA: power punching your presentations”. The topics covered were content (rhetoric and visual aids) and delivery (voice and nonverbal communication) that would advance participants’ presentation skills.