Skip to Main Content

Assignment | Final Projects (McGinley): Presentations

ARTS 1301 | Prof. Mike McGinley (Fall 2023)

Oral Citations: Documenting Your Sources in a Speech

Whatever the format, citations provide evidence that your statements are reasonable and believable. When giving a presentation or speech, though, you can't just read out parenthetical citations like you'd write in a paper.

Oral citations sound like...

  • "According to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, ..."

Other Examples of Phrases Signalling a Verbal Citation

  • "Psychologist Jane Doe suggests that..."
  • "Researchers out of State University's College of Economics published a study in which they..."
  • "The New York Times ran an article in March 2021 reporting that..."

While in your slides, you'd have...

Sample Slide

  • The Burj Khalifa is the tallest building in the world ("Tallest")

Works Cited

"Tallest Buildings." Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, https://www.skyscrapercenter.com/buildings. Accessed 14 February 2025.

It would sound weird to say out loud, "According to 'Tallest Buildings,' the Burj Khalifa..."

It gets better if we say "According to the article 'Tallest Buildings,'..." but the organization in this case is the more interesting entity to name out loud. Your audience can read the less interesting citation on your slide.

Best Practices

Introduce the Source

  • Not great: Jane Doe says...
  • Good: Psychologist Jane Doe says...
  • Best: Psychologist Jane Doe, a researcher in pop culture fandom, says...

Namedrop the Best

  • Expert or leading organization? Name them!
  • Random news article journalist? Probably skip naming the author out loud. Use the publishing organization instead.
    • Not "John Smith writes that..."
    • Instead, "The Washington Post published an article this year that says..."

Style Recommendations for Best Impact

  Bad Better

Font Size

There's a little more leeway for a virtual presentation since no one's at the back of the room in your audience...but still keep it pretty large.

Rule of thumb: no smaller than size 28.

 Slide has "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" nursery rhyme as bullet points in a small font. Similar slide but the main text is sized larger to show up on the slide better (between font size 28-32)

Colors

Keep a limited palette of coordinated colors. Avoid putting bright colors on top of each other. Red/blue is a notoriously hard-to-read combo.

Color palette is okay but the contrast is too low using black and dark red text on top of a dark grey background.Red text on blue is hard to read. There are too many different colors on this slide, and they don't contrast well with the background.

Use greater contrast in colors, or use a lighter color in between the dark text and dark background,

Images

If you use an image in the background, make sure your text shows up clearly on it. Often this means adding a solid shape behind the text or fading/darkening the image.

If you have a smaller image side-by-side with text, make sure your text doesn't run over into it.

The busy background and color variations makes it hard for the text to be easily read.

The last couple lines of text are longer than the previous four, and they end up overlapping with the slide image.

Darkening or partially covering up the background image behind the text will keep your text readable.

The image and text do not overlap in this configuration. (A solid background was added so that the text wouldn't overlap with a default background design element, too.)

Limit Your Word Count

You shouldn't have lots of text on your slides. Bullet points, not paragraphs.

Lots of text is boring to look at! It takes up space for visuals, as well.

Plus, your audience can read faster than you speak and will be reading ahead -- but will also be distracted by you talking. Lose-lost situation.

 This slide has a whole paragraph on it! It could be worse...but it could also be better. This turned the paragraph into a bulleted list of main ideas.