FOA Reflection

My FOA presentation was given today and personally I see it as an opportunity for betterment.  The chosen topic for my presentation was to analyze Tide commercial’s views of women overtime while mainly looking at their use of gender stereotypes. Tide being a detergent company has existed since the late 1900’s so there is a range of advertisements which focus on women. My aim was to illustrate that this set of advertisements reveal that the image of women has in fact evolved, but the central themes have not (women are homemakers, wives, etc.).

The presentation was marked based on four criteria; Knowledge and Understanding of the text’s conceptual ideas and understanding how it’s used it both its pictorial and literary format. Personally I think the advertisements which were chosen were completely relevant to the presentation because they clearly outlined the topic. They were not very difficult to find but during the research phase I decided I would need to find ones that were direct and in the case of the video not long.

The information and analysis I provided was good but personally I think that I was not able to pick up on all the language relation as I could have. I choose to focus on pictorial elements and ideas based around the stereotype instead of using language as a main guide.  In the future to fix this I need to focus on the presentation’s main purposes to reach the goal. Another problem I saw was that I had not used the Pathos Logos and Ethos elements in my presentation even though they were clearly used in the advertisement. I feel I did not touch on this as much because it was not as relevant to my topic as other techniques but I should have still touched on them. On a positive note I feel I did well recognizing the different elements throughout the entire advertisement which lead to the answering of the unit question. My presentation was also very thorough and detailed hence timed at 9mins 30 seconds.

During the actual presentation I feel I did not do as well as I could have. Public speaking has been somewhat of a strong suit which is why it startled me when I found myself constantly looking down at my paper. I had understood all my main ideas and really did not need the paper there but then out of nervousness I looked down at the paper rather than keeping eye contact with the classroom. In the future to completely avoid this I can prepare myself better and highlight only main points on my page and keep eye contact when speaking. This will help me majorly.  I also felt there were certain situations where I was talking to fast. This again was due to nervousness and I think this will automatically fix the next time presentations come around.

Overall I think my performance and presentation had the right information and thoroughly answered the unit question directly through the use of the advertisements.. In the future I will have to fix my presentation skills but I fell most of things will be fixed automatically when the second presentation comes.