For more than a decade, Beloit College has been releasing an annual "Mind-Set List" to help define the common worldview of the incoming first-year undergraduate class. Though this popular list is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, its point is to provide "cultural touchstones" for university folk to help us understand what the new crop of students has and has not experienced in 18 years of life. For the class in question at the time of this writing—the class of 2020—the list is 60 items long and includes these entries:

• West Nile has always been a virus found in the U.S.
• Catholics and Lutherans have always been in agreement on how to get to heaven.
• Books have always been read to you on audible.com.
• Snowboarding has always been an Olympic sport.
• Robots have always been surgical partners in the O.R.
• Michael J. Fox has always spoken publicly about having Parkinson's disease.

As a veteran teacher, what I always appreciated about this list is that it really did make me think about the experiences of the incoming class as well as my own experiences, especially in regard to writing and technology. The above list excerpt reflects rapidly implemented and vast technological changes that visibly affect our daily lives, and both students and faculty benefit from grasping the scope of such changes.

As a modern student writer, you compose at the keyboard, and while writing a paper you might also be checking Facebook, sniping an e-Bay auction, texting friends, watching youtube, running a grammar checker, answering e-mails—all at the same time. Meanwhile, you may also be receiving peer feedback or e-mail commentary from your teacher before your paper is even graded, and the form of the paper might include a Powerpoint presentation or poster. In short, with high-speed technology and voluminous resources at your fingertips, you must be able to multitask, collaborate, use multimedia, and define yourself as a thinking writer who is "plugged-in" in every sense of the term.

This chapter is devoted to helping you become a better communicator within the context of the computer age. Sometimes this means schooling yourself in long-established fundamentals, while other times it means understanding technology as a communication toolkit. Whether you’re writing an e-mail to a professor, giving a Powerpoint presentation, creating an online portfolio, or sitting down for an interview, you need to focus on how well you present yourself, both in the corporeal world and the virtual world.

 

Every e-mail user has received at least one. You open your inbox to discover an offer from, say, the nephew or second cousin of a deceased king who is happy to give you a portion of millions of dollars if you will simply reply favorably to the request to help transfer funds to a bank account of your choice. The most creative and convincing one I’ve received expressed concern that I had recently passed away (I had not), and if this was not so then I needed to inform someone in Nigeria immediately so that my waiting inheritance didn’t go to my undeserving relatives. Such scam e-mails range from being badly written to artfully manipulative, and they often make their way past spam blockers and include subject lines such as "An Invitation," "Humble Request," or "Please Help!!"

Ironically, I have received e-mails from students containing these same subject lines, and the requests made within those e-mails were often less persuasive than the type outlined above, for one simple reason—the writer failed to demonstrate any sense of e-mail etiquette. My concern in such a case isn’t just that the writer has failed to communicate with me effectively; I speculate and worry that such bad practices will carry over into the student’s workplace, where daily and effective e-mail communication is vital to good job performance. On the job, you will literally be communicating via e-mail with scores of others with a simple touch of the Enter key, and whatever you send becomes, in a sense, part of a permanent record. Also, your e-mail will be one of potentially hundreds that your target reader receives in a week or even a single day, so you’ll want it to be read and noticed for the right reasons.

To ensure that you become an urbane and effective user of e-mail, some essential rules for e-mail etiquette follow.

First, Decide if E-Mail is the Best Form of Correspondence

Just because you received a request by e-mail doesn’t mean it’s the ideal medium for a response. Before initiating any e-mail correspondence, always consider whether a memo, letter, phone call, or face-to-face meeting is a better choice. Do not feel obliged to make trivial e-mail responses; in many cases there is no need to reply at all. In short, be certain to choose the best, most efficient mode of communication for the circumstances.

Use a Short, Definitive Subject Line

The value of a solid subject line is indisputable, especially since the subject line usually appears in the electronic mailbox right next to the sender’s name. It is tempting to write cryptic little teasers in your subject line ("Wow! Check This Out!!") to get your reader’s attention, but this is always a bad practice, leading to the potential for your e-mail to be blocked as spam or simply trashed by the user. A much more civilized practice is to make your subject line concrete, informative, and respectful ("Electrical Engineering Student Requests Your Input"). Remember too that the subject line is part of the message’s permanent record, and it may be used by the receiver of your message to decide where to file your message for future use; choose the wording of your line accordingly.

Follow the Conventions for Effective Paragraph Writing

Even in electronic communication, the standards for good sentencing and paragraphing apply. Complete sentences grounded in subjects and verbs should be the rule, not the exception, and transition words should be placed at the beginnings of pivotal sentences and paragraphs. When you reply to direct questions that you copy into your text from an original file, quick, one-word replies might suffice just below the questions, but otherwise you should avoid fragmentary snippets of ideas in favor of complete sentences. Keep your paragraphs short to enhance readability, because scrolling is usually necessary to read even a short message, and the reader tends to race through the text hurriedly.

Write from the Top Down and Focus Your Content on a Single Subject

When writing e-mails, borrow the convention followed in newspaper articles of "writing from the top down," putting the most important information at the top of the message so that it can’t be missed. Most users will decide whether or not to read your e-mail within seconds; therefore, the opening of your message must be designed to survive snap decisions. Use the opening statements as a quick summary of the most important content, and stick to a single subject throughout. If specific action is needed in response to the e-mail, note that such action is needed as part of purpose statement in the first paragraph, then use the rest of the e-mail to flesh out your reasoning. If you need to discuss multiple subjects, consider the use of multiple mailings with individual subject lines, or use a helpful table of contents and section heads within the e-mail to facilitate effective browsing.

If Necessary, use a Narrative Greeting to Specify Your Identity and Affiliation

Do not rely on your e-mail address or signature at the bottom of the document to be the sole indicators of your identity and affiliation. Even readers within your same organization—especially at a large university or corporation—may not automatically recognize your name. Therefore, use a first short paragraph as a narrative greeting to specify your identity, affiliation, and even to echo your subject line.

When Replying to Messages, Retain Only What is Needed to Give Context to Your Response

All e-mail software includes a response feature, which typically copies the sender’s message over into a new message box for you, fills out the "To," "From," and "Subject" lines, and precedes each line of the original message with a symbol such as ">." However, for the sake of efficiency and clarity, you should cut the unnecessary lines of the sender’s original message and respond point-by-point to particular issues raised by the sender, positioning your new text just beneath the sender’s specific text that you are replying to. If you are simply responding to a single question that was asked amidst a lengthy paragraph, you might delete everything but the question so that your message is efficient and the context clear.

Learn how to Handle Attachments and Text Files

Attachments are one of the most common problems people have with e-mail correspondence, especially with the potential for viruses to be transferred via an attachment. Attachments are often courteous to include with e-mail messages, in part because they can be used to retain the appearance of an original file, including special characters and formatting, and they can be transferred immediately and for free. Your e-mail software dictates precisely how attachments are sent, but typically, in order to send an attachment, you drag and drop a representative icon, or use a pull-down menu to choose a desktop file. Some users prefer to receive attachments as text files in the body of the e-mail message itself, because text files are compact and electronically universal. Also, the form the attachment takes—whether in Word or as a pdf—determines how readily it can be opened from one computer to the next. If there are any ambiguities, the best practice is to communicate with the e-mail’s receiver about the nature of the attachment—the software used to create it, for instance—and if possible to include a text version of the attachment in the body of the e-mail message as well.

Be Sensitive to Who Might Read Your Message and How They Might Read It

Even more than letters or memos, e-mail is surprisingly portable. There are few laws specifically governing e-mail, and the mores of the workplace can easily lend themselves to electronic gossip. E-mail can be printed out, passed on electronically to other parties, saved on a disk, or readily altered by anyone who receives it. Therefore, it is unwise to discuss certain subjects by e-mail, especially those that are sensitive, confidential, or damaging. What was intended as a light-hearted editorial aside can lead to a chilly little war. Assume that any message you send could become part of a permanent record, and control the content of the message accordingly.

Cite Sources Accurately and Quote Individuals Faithfully

Even an e-mail message is worthy of accurate citation and quotation, especially if you are quoting an individual from whom you received a message. When doing so, copy and paste the person’s actual words rather than paraphrase them. However, also remember that standards of etiquette and good sense dictate that you should not quote another party’s words without that person’s implied or express permission. If you need to cite a source formally, as in a paper, be sure to give enough bibliographic information in the e-mail so that the receiver could track down the original source if needed.

Fit Your Tone to the Circumstances, Always Favoring the Courteous

Most circumstances allow for a blend of a personal and professional tone to your e-mail messages. Just as when you write a cover letter for a job, you want to maintain both a personal, amiable voice (often enhanced by the use of contractions and the first-person pronoun "I") and professional content (characterized by examples and evidence that relate to the point you are making). However, be aware that some e-mail messages—say, those that may become part of a formal report or those likely to become part of some permanent record—demand a completely formal tone. Finally, if tone is an issue, when you want to be certain that a sentence you just wrote expresses the emotion you want, consider following the sentence with an emoticon (often called a "smiley"). Obviously, use emoticons with restraint and selectivity; sparse use is best.

Assess the Rank and Stature of your E-mail Receiver, and Compose Accordingly

Computer mailboxes give social equality to all messages as they arrive, which can seem to crumble hierarchies. Just as you can send a message to a long-time pal with a few simple taps of the keys, you can readily write to the CEO of a company or a university president just by discovering that person’s e-mail address. Nevertheless, always keep in mind the position of the person you are writing to, and be certain to honor the niceties and respect that should come with that position. Maintain this respect and a tactful tone in everything from the greeting you use to the connotations of the words you choose. Even if you are composing your message at 3:00 a.m. while barefoot and in your bathrobe, the tone of your message should suggest that you are seated in the recipient’s office, dressed for daylight and well-shod.

Avoid Flaming

Flaming is responding to the e-mail of others in an opinionated, emotional manner, often in an inflammatory way. Even if you find the tone of another person’s e-mail especially combustible, a good rule of thumb is to wait 24 hours before replying, and be certain that any emotional response you do give will not be misinterpreted. Flaming begets more flaming and makes for bad diplomacy and ineffective communication.

Carefully Discern the Tone of Messages Sent by Others

We all develop skills that we can apply to face-to-face meetings and telephone conversations, including body language and voice inflection, but e-mail, despite its similarities to conversation, does not allow us to employ these skills. Remember that messages you receive will include nuances of style and tone, yet the intentions of the writer may be different from what you expect. In e-mail correspondence, people are not only more likely to write in an informal, relaxed tone, they are also more likely to editorialize ("What a silly thing to say."), reply emotionally to individual phrases or sentences ("Are you damn sure this percentage is correct?"), and be curt or sarcastic ("Oh, right!"). Be certain to interpret the tone of others’ messages with discretion and, if necessary, with a bit of latitude.

Learn Key Acronyms Commonly Used in E-Mail Messages

Many users of e-mail save time—and appear relaxed and hip, too—by using acronyms in their correspondence. A list of some of the common ones follows:

Acronyms and corresponding plain text

Acronym	Plain Text
BTW	by the way
F2F	face-to-face
FAQ	frequently asked question
FYI	for your information
JTYLTK	just thought you’d like to know
AFAIK	as far as I know
LOL	laughing out loud
OTOH	on the other hand
RFC	request for comments
TTYL	talk to you later

Even though the use of such acronyms is common, keep in mind that your readers—especially international readers or new e-mail users—may not know what they mean, and in messages that will become part of a formal document these acronyms should be avoided.

Be Extremely Cautious with Listservs

Listservs, where a user sends copies of a single message to multiple readers, are handy because of the volume of people they can reach at once. However, be cautious about responding to messages that you receive through listservs; you may unintentionally send a message to every member of the list, leading to accidental, often irritated, audience members and wasted time. Instead of automatically replying to the message with the "reply" function, which may send a message to every person who received the original one, copy out the address of the person you wish to reply to, and write an individual message in a new window just to that person.

Familiarize Yourself with the Rules of Your Particular Electronic Community

Any electronic community, especially one that makes use of a listserv, should have implied or written rules of etiquette, often in an FAQ page. Usually, these rules will specify appropriate behaviors and procedures in relation to flaming, e-mail distribution, replying to messages, and frequently asked questions. The most mannerly users make it a point to learn the rules of their electronic community and follow them.

Proofread and Spell Check Your Work Carefully

Beware of the strong temptation to let the seeming informality of e-mail cause you to be sloppy about punctuation, spelling, and proofreading. I once had a student seeking my help on a paper write an e-mail to me, simply stating, "I have a paper dude on Thursday. OK?" (Unable to resist the temptation, I shot him back my smart-aleck reply: "That’s okay with me, dude.") Your readers, especially your professors or supervisors, will likely be irritated by such errors in e-mail messages, in particular if they reflect a general sloppiness. Proofread and spell check the message text before sending it.

Beware of Silly or Offensive Signature Lines and Enigmatic Aliases

Most people create signatures or an electronic alias that is automatically attached to the end of any message you send. The standard contents of signatures include the sender’s name, affiliation, e-mail address, phone numbers, and the like. Many users also include their nicknames, favorite quirks, past-times, personal habits, quotations, thoughts for the day, and keyboard artwork. Signature lines and aliases by students tend to favor nicknames that smack of secret identities ("The Lurker," "King of Pain") or personal credos ("Long Live Luke Skywalker," "Dave Matthews Rules"). You should obviously deactivate such signature lines when communicating with a professor or potential employer. Otherwise, you run the risk of irritating someone or even embarrassing yourself: Imagine a potential employer to whom you once e-mailed your resume forever thinking of you as "The Bedbug."

When asked about grammar checkers, some teachers of English will immediately darken their eyes and pronounce them evil. No, this is not because they worry about losing their jobs to computers (English teachers will always be needed, certainly), but because they recognize the limitations of grammar checkers and fear that they make writers lazy or unthinking. Because my paper passed the grammar checker’s test, some think, it must be fine.

A simple demonstration will prove otherwise. Consider the following nonsense sentence:

Grammar checker tell this sentence just fine, even when longer made, even made more nonsense, full of grommets, so trust grammar checker little, worked harder instead, with eye for errors open, until grammar understood better, by you, who more politic than checker, which allow manifold mistake, all over place, indeed.

My grammar checker has no problem with this silly sentence; though any thinking reader would, and even assigns it a 12th grade reading level. Conversely, when I test sentences from one of our most lyrical works on science and nature, Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey the grammar checker frequently wags its finger unhappily at the author, befuddled by his comma use, syntax, and sentence length. To put it plainly then, "Grammar checkers is stupid"—another sentence my checker accepts readily. This should be no surprise of course, in that grammar checkers merely match patterns derived from mechanical computations and offer suggestions with no understanding of context. In other words, they do not think. Since we do, we must and can learn to outperform them.

With these concerns in mind, I certainly do use and recommend grammar checkers to thinking writers, following these guidelines:

• Grammar checkers come with default settings, which can be changed to suit your needs. For instance, in my version of Word, I can go to "Tools" in my menu, choose "Options," then choose "Spelling and Grammar," and elect which options I wish to employ as my grammar checker crawls through my writing. Writing styles the checker monitors include such options as gender-specific words and passive voice, and the choices you elect in your settings influence the nature and number of suggestions made. You can also, for instance, invite the grammar checker to always suggest corrections or always ignore internet addresses. Look at your settings carefully and make choices for them that suit you as a writer, tinkering with your spelling and grammar options as needed.
• Grammar checkers are best at catching subject/verb agreement problems and unintentional verb tense shifts. Be sure you agree with the checker’s suggestions in these areas. You can brush up on these subjects in Chapter 1 of this manual.
• Grammar checkers are especially useful if you want to reduce your usage of passive voice, in that passive voice sentences are faithfully flagged. Keep in mind that passive voice is often acceptable (see "The Passive versus Active Voice Dilemma" in this manual), but use the grammar checker to help you favor the active voice.
• As you use your checker, always take a moment to note the explanation provided about the problem to be certain it fits the circumstances. For example, the grammar checker mislabels the following complete sentence as a fragment: "My papers, which I completed with my partners, Sue and James, received high marks." Obviously, consult a style handbook to help you address uncertainties.
• My experience and research suggest that grammar checkers are least effective at discerning punctuation errors, and they are also especially poor at recognizing the proper use or absence of "a" and "the" (as shown by my example nonsense sentence earlier).
• Grammar checkers are particularly good at detecting certain kinds of typing errors, such as a space before a comma, an unintentionally repeated word, or a sentence with no end punctuation. Use them to help you catch such errors, which you can scan for visually even without actually proofreading a document.
• Keep in mind that, in a particular document, once you have accepted a sentence as error-free even though the grammar checker flagged it, it might not be challenged by the checker again, even after you do a bit of tinkering. This makes your thoughtful consideration of any suggestions made by the checker even more important.

I once attended a talk where the speaker held everyone’s attention for a key five minutes by pulling the Seinfeld trick—putting on "a show about nothing." An engineer at a small, struggling company, he was near the end of a slick Powerpoint presentation about whether the design for a critical machine should be modernized to speed up production, and he presented three options:

1. Retool the machine in-house, which would sacrifice a month of production time but result in faster output in the long run.
2. Buy a new machine from a known distributor, which would involve a hefty up-front expense but save labor costs and time;
3. Do nothing.

That’s right—do nothing. Continue with production and learn to live with the sacrifices.

To dramatize this third point, the speaker filled the presentation screen—which up to then had held colorful Powerpoint slides employing slick transitions and graphics—with nothing. He simply left the screen blank, proposed the option of taking no action, and then shut off the projector. For the next five minutes, he engaged the audience members—which included the company president and the company accountant—by switching to a lecture format, moving around the room without so much as a pointer or note card, and arguing his case: that it was smarter for the company to maintain status quo, especially since it was struggling financially. Ultimately, he impressed his point on the audience not with the magic of presentation software, but with reasoning, creativity, common sense, and the bottom line. As the speaker hoped, the company bought into option number 3.

As this example demonstrates, effective oral presentation is more about creative thinking on your feet and basic skills than about wearing good shoes and knowing how to turn on the computer projector. Companies have long cried for graduates who can give dynamic talks, and they have long relied on talks as a key way to sway concerned parties towards a desired outcome. But many presenters make the mistake of trying to let the computer, bells and whistles blaring, do all the work for them. They forget the fundamentals of oral presentation, and thus whatever polish they have quickly loses its luster.

To become a modern speaker worth listening to, whether you’re serving as a company representative or presenting at a conference, you must come fully prepared, engage your audience’s attention and memory, attend to some visual design basics, and take stock of how you come across as a speaker.

Preparing for a Talk

There’s a rule-of-thumb in carpentry: Measure twice, cut once. The tenets behind this principle should be obvious—once a mistake is made, it’s difficult or impossible to undo. Though the carpenter can usually spackle or glue to repair, as a speaker you simply cannot get back those three minutes you just wasted in a fifteen-minute presentation. The following preparation principles will keep you right on plumb.

• Practice your talk straight through, and as you go jot quick notes to yourself about how to improve it. If you cannot manage to practice your talk straight through, perhaps you are not yet ready to offer it.
• Ideally, practice your talk under conditions similar to those in which you will give it, considering such factors as acoustics, distance from the audience, lighting, and room size. Lighting becomes especially important when computer equipment is involved. Be mentally prepared to adapt to the environmental conditions.
• As a draft, present your talk to a friend or two first and have them critique it. If you’re really gutsy and can tolerate the unforgiving lens of the camcorder, videotape your practice talk and critique it afterwards.
• View all of your visuals from your audience’s perspective prior to your talk. Be sure that your audience can easily see all that you want them to see, especially material that appears in the lower half of the screen.
• When you give a talk professionally, always request presentation guidelines from any relevant organizations and conform to them explicitly. It would be embarrassing for you if you were expected to present units in metric, for example, and you did otherwise because you failed to request or follow the available guidelines.
• As part of your preparation, choose an appropriately snappy and helpful title. You are expected not to come off as stodgy. Which talk would you rather attend: "Specific Geometrical Objects with Fractional Dimensions and Their Various Applications to Nature in General and The Universe At Large as we Know it" or "And On The Eighth Day, God Created Fractals"?
• Become highly familiar with any technology you’ll be using. Practice with the actual hardware or type of hardware you’ll be working with, making sure that compatibility or speed issues don’t get in your way. I’ve seen students go to present at a conference with a zip disk of their talk confidently in hand, only to find that the computer they were using didn’t have a zip drive. To facilitate faster computer speed, load your presentation onto the desktop if possible rather than run it from a CD or flash drive. If websites are needed as part of your presentation, check connection speeds and make sure all URLs are up and running.

Helping Your Audience Remember Your Key Points

Andy Warhol is known for the comment that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. If your 15 minutes of fame is during your oral presentation, you want to be sure not to blow it. I’m amazed at how many times I’ve sat through a talk and come away with only a vague sense of what it was about. There are many reasons for this—some speakers view their talk as simply a format for reading a paper, while others fill the air with many words but little substance—but the most common reason is the simplest one: the speaker showed uncertainty about the talk's alleged subject. If you don’t spell out your premise, highlight your key points, and make it easy for your audience to remember the thrust of your presentation, you can’t expect your listeners to come away with understanding and investment.

To ensure an engaged audience for your talk, follow these practices:

• Introduce and Conclude. Use a formal introduction at the beginning of your talk and a summary afterwards to highlight your major points. Make sure your audience can remember your key points by keeping them simple and straightforward—even enumerated.
• Present in Sections. Give your talk "parts" —usually no more than three major parts for practical purposes—and let us know when we’re transitioning from one part to the next. This will help your audience to remain interested and focused.
• Spell out the Objective. Give the talk’s objective and even a hint of the conclusion right up front. Articulate the objective on its own slide so we can’t miss it. Revisit the objective at the end if necessary to underscore how it was realized.
• Use Props. Consider the use of some simple, meaningful props—even pass them around. Props can generate audience interest and, especially if they represent the actual work you did, they make the nature of that work more concrete. I’ve been to great talks where an experimental sample or photographs representing production sites were passed around, and they often generated focused questions from the audience members afterwards.
• Use Handouts. If appropriate, give a handout. As long as it’s well-designed, a concise written summary with bulleted points on a handout will ensure that your talk can be followed throughout. Such a handout should ideally be just one or two pages long, and be sure to time and manage its distribution so that it doesn’t take away attention from you as you speak. One possibility for handouts is an actual printout of your slides through the "Handouts" option in Powerpoint, but be certain that your audience actually needs all of your slides before electing this option.
• Offer Q&A. If question and answer is involved as part of the end of the talk, don’t let any questions deflect our interest. Some audience members might try to draw the attention to themselves, or focus on a mistake or uncertainty in your presentation, or even undermine your authority directly with an intimidating challenge. (I recall one speaker at a professional conference being tossed the strange question, "Your data is crap, isn’t it?") Remember that the stage and agenda are yours, and it’s your job to keep it that way and end your talk with a bang, not a whimper. If you don’t know the answer to a question, admit it or offer to discuss it privately after the presentation, then move on. One savvy way to handle questions is to turn back to your presentation slides as you answer them—call up a slide that will help repeat or explain the relevant point—and this will remind your audience that your talk had substance.

Mastering the Basics of Slide Design

Powerpoint helps us to think of each projected page as a "slide" in a slideshow. But just as someone else’s home movies can be thoroughly uninteresting if they’re grainy, poor in quality, and irrelevant, Powerpoint slides that are too flashy, cluttered, meaningless, or poorly designed can quickly turn a darkened room full of smart people into a mere gathering of snoozers. As you design your slides, consider these factors:

• Templates. Even though Powerpoint helps you design your slides, don’t assume that someone else’s template will always match your needs. Take charge of slide design by considering first the most efficient way to transmit the necessary information.
• Simplicity. Keep slides as simple and uncluttered as possible, and if the information must be complex, prioritize it for your audience as you present it (e.g., if presenting a ten-column table, direct your audience to the most significant columns). Offer only one major point per illustration. If you need to focus on more than one point, re-present the illustration in another form on a separate slide with the different point emphasized.
• Titles. Give most slides titles, with a font size of at least 36 points, and body text with a font size of at least 24 points. If you need to cite a source of information, include the citation in a smaller font size at the bottom of your slide.
• Rule of 8s. Apply the "rule of 8s": include no more than 8 words per line and 8 lines per slide.
• Bullets. When using bulleted lists in slides, present each bulleted line in parallel fashion—i.e., if the first line is a fragment, the others should be as well; if the first line opens with a verb, so should the others.
• Design. Design slides so that their longest dimension is horizontal rather than vertical. Use both uppercase and lowercase letters and orient pictures left to right. Avoid the overuse of animations and transitions, especially audio-based transitions, which can be distracting and downright silly.
• Color. Make sure the color for both the background and text are highly readable, especially under less than optimal lighting conditions. There’s nothing wrong with basic dark lettering and white background for your slides, particularly if they’re text-based. If you do choose a background theme or color, enhance continuity and viewability by keeping it consistent and subtle.
• Images. When possible, replace words with images. Use images in particular when presenting data, demonstrating trends, simplifying complex issues, and visualizing abstractions.
• Spelling. Spelling does count, and you can’t rely on Powerpoint to be an effective proofreader. Be sure your slides are free of grammatical and spelling errors. As Will Rogers quipped, "Nothing you can’t spell will ever work."

Maintaining the Look and Sound of a Professional Speaker

Public speaking is often cited by people as their number one fear (with death, ironically, as number two. Clearly, no one overcomes such fear overnight, and no one set of tips can transmogrify you into a polished speaker. However, you can work through that fear by learning from the successes of others. As Christopher Lasch once noted, "Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success." Good speakers attend first to their wardrobe, dressing as well as their "highest ranking" audience member is likely to dress. An equally important part of looking and sounding like a professional speaker is how you handle your body language and your voice. You must exude confidence if you want to be taken seriously, and remember that a high percentage of your audience’s perception is not about what you say but about how you look when you say it. The following guidelines will help you to look good and sound good as you give a talk:

• Take care not to stand in the way of your own slides—many speakers do this without even realizing it. Especially when using an overhead projector, point to the projected image of your slide (ideally, use a stick pointer or laser pointer) rather than the original source. This helps you avoid covering up more of the image than you intended and keeps our focus on the projected image rather than your accidental hand shadow puppet.
• Ideally, use the mouse pointer, a stick pointer, or a laser pointer to draw our attention to a particular item on the screen. One simple circle drawn briefly around the selected information is enough to draw our attention. Beware of slapping a stick pointer loudly against a screen, or leaving a laser pointer on for so long that its bright dot shakes all over the screen as a blazing red mirror of your nervousness.
• When you are not using a slide directly, keep it out of sight or out of your audience’s line of attention. Turn off the projector or create a dark screen when no visuals are relevant; literally invite your audience to turn its attention away from one thing to another.
• When working with computer projection, do not trust that hardware will always perform as you anticipate. Sometimes equipment fails midstream, or what worked fine for one speaker in a group doesn’t work for the next. If necessary, take backup transparencies of your slides ready for use on an overhead projector. Be certain that an overhead projector is available beforehand as a fallback.
• Don’t forget the value of a good old-fashioned easel or chalkboard. Not only do they offer variety, they are especially good for writing down basic information that you also want your audience to muse over or write down, or for presenting a picture as it evolves via its individual pieces (e.g., a flow chart, schematic, or simple experimental set-up).
• Maintain eye contact with at least a few people—especially those who are being the most responsive—in various parts of the room. Conversely, if you’re especially nervous about one or two audience members or you note some audience members looking sour or uninterested, avoid eye contact with them.
• Refer to time as an organizational tool: "For the next two minutes, I will summarize the city’s housing problem, then I will move on to . . . " This keeps both you and your audience anchored.
• Use the "point, turn, talk" technique. Pause when you have to turn or point to something, then turn back towards the audience, then talk. This gives emphasis to the material and keeps you connected with audience members. Strictly avoid talking sideways or backwards at your audience.
• Use physical gestures sparingly and with intention. For instance, raise three fingers and say "thirdly" as you make your third point; pull your hands toward your chest slightly as you advocate the acceptance of an idea. Beware, though, of overusing your body, especially to the point of distraction. Some speakers habitually flip their hair, fiddle with their keys, or talk with their hands. I’ve heard some people recommend that speakers keep one hand in a pocket to avoid overusing physical gestures.
• Minimize the amount of walking necessary during your talk, but do stand rather than sit because it commands more authority. As you speak, keep your feet firmly rooted and avoid continual shuffling of your weight. Intentionally leaning slightly on one leg most of the time can help keep you comfortable and relaxed.
• Take care to pronounce all words correctly, especially those key to the discipline. Check pronunciation of ambiguous words beforehand to be certain. It would be embarrassing to mispronounce "Euclidian" or "Möbius strip" in front of a group of people that you want to impress. I once mispronounced the word "banal" during a speech to English professors and one of the audience members actually interrupted to correct me. Most of that speech was—as you might guess—banal.
• Dead air is much better than air filled with repeated "ums," "likes," and "you knows." Get to know your personal "dead air" fillers and eliminate them. Out of utter boredom during a rotten speech a few years ago, I counted the number of times the speaker (a professor) used the word "basically" as an empty transition—44 times in just five minutes. Don’t be afraid to pause occasionally to give your listeners time to digest your information and give yourself a moment for reorientation. To quote Martin Fraquhar, "Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech."
• If you know that you have a mannerism that you can’t easily avoid—such as stuttering or a heavy accent—and it distracts you from making a good speech, consider getting past it by just pointing it out to the audience and moving on. I’ve been to several talks where the speaker opened by saying "Please accept the fact, as I have, that I’m a stutterer, and I’m likely to stutter a bit throughout my speech." One such speaker even injected humor by noting that James Earl Jones, one of his heroes, was also once a stutterer, so he felt in good company. As you might guess, the following speeches were confidently and effectively delivered, and when the mannerism arose it was easy to overlook.
• Avoid clichés, slang, and colloquialisms, but don’t be so formal that you’re afraid to speak in contractions or straightforward, simple terms. Use visual language, concrete nouns, active single-word verbs. When using specialized or broad terms that might be new or controversial to some audience members, be sure to define them clearly, and be prepared to defend your definition.
• Be animated and enthusiastic, but carefully so—many notches above the "just-the facts" Joe Friday, but many notches below the over-the-top Chris Rock.

When an artist is asked about her work, she can dig into an oversized folder and slap down photographs or sketches that she feels best represent her artistic prowess. When a teacher is seeking a job, he can trot out, in paper form, his evaluations from student teaching, his lesson plans, and his written philosophy about education.

By comparison, how can a scientist or engineer, equipped with an armload of skills and bucketfuls of experience, effectively present this background to a potential employer, in a way that is personal, relevant, interesting, and cohesive? Answer: an online portfolio.

Fields such as fine arts and education enjoy a long-standing tradition of portable portfolios as vehicles to showcase a student’s best work. Now, thanks to the lightning-fast information age, where details can be zipped across virtual space and both text and graphics can be rendered in neat, downloadable packages, all students can readily create online portfolios that they feel best represent their work and their lives. Essentially, an online portfolio is a series of linked webpages uploaded and maintained by the student—pages that represent the student both personally and professionally. An online portfolio is your chance to work with cache—a storage buffer in a computer’s CPU—and to create cachet—a personal insignia representing your individuality and quality.

Publishing an online portfolio isn’t just fun and creative—it’s quickly becoming common practice for the best students in a program. Schools are now coaxing students to start creating portfolios as early as their first year of study, and they’re hiring support staff and posting pages to be sure students have the tools they need to publish their work online. As described in most literature on the subject, preparing an online portfolio boils down to a three-step process: Collect, Select, and Reflect. Collection involves amassing your evidence and beginning to launch it into cyberspace; selection means culling the best pieces from your evidence; reflection is your opportunity to ponder and explain the choices you made about your portfolio pieces and even your life choices. And as you publish your portfolio online, following some basic principles of design will help ensure that your work makes an effective splash. The result is an organized virtual space where friends, family, and employers can gaze through a public window to catch intriguing glimpses of your online world.

Collect: Gathering the Parts of Your Portfolio

Think of your college experiences as a living mosaic. You’ve spent years completing diverse tasks or creating "snapshots" of your work: fine-tuning a project design, performing research, writing papers or memos, composing a resume, participating in group work, writing co-op reports, learning graphics packages, and earning grades. All of these experiences make for worthy candidates for your portfolio. You’ve also spent years gathering more personal "snapshots": IM sports participation, photographs of friends and pets, bookmarks of favorite websites, personal accomplishments, inspiring quotations, journal writings, society membership, awards, and hobbies. These are equally worthy candidates for a portfolio. Your collection process begins with you mentally cataloging each piece of the mosaic and deciding how to use it.

Most students begin to collect material for their portfolios by thinking of the work they’ve done as a printed product. With the professional resume being the most common and efficient standard of printable evidence available, almost all portfolios include an updated resume, perhaps downloadable as a pdf file. In fact, you might begin your portfolio simply by uploading your resume just to get you started, since the resume tends to be a critical cornerstone to the whole package. Portfolio writers also typically upload sample essays or reports they’ve written—again these are common standards by which all students are judged. However, more creative students think about additional pieces of "printable" evidence for their portfolios—pieces that stress the student’s skills as a communicator, a consultant, an engineer, a designer. Among the online portfolios I’ve seen, students have presented their Excel-based designs for everything from a coffee mug to a Battlebot; a copy of a Powerpoint presentation or an effective letter they wrote to the campus newspaper editor; the daily construction site logs they kept while completing an internship; scanned copies of handwritten evaluations they received from their co-op supervisor; even a sample family newsletter that they edited. Such pieces of evidence are usually presented essentially as they would look in a hard copy, thus inviting the viewer to print them off or read them right in the browser.

For those willing to think even further outside the box, portfolio contents can reflect such personal attributes as oral communication skills, reliability and aptitude for planning, creativity and innovation, level of community service, willingness to travel, quality of judgment, and even social responsibility. Some students create videos of themselves giving a speech or participating in a debate; others present tables that chart their course selection for each school year as a kind of "planning matrix," listing the competencies they achieved as part of those particular courses. Still others offer pictures of themselves that they think will demonstrate those more personal assets that all employers are interested in, using photograph captions to define how they have developed intercultural awareness ("Here I am in a village in France, chatting with locals about. . ."), or why they believe in volunteerism ("This Habitat for Humanity project helped three families . . ."), or showing they have a sense of humor ("This is me, last Halloween, as Austin Powers.") In one portfolio I found online, the student included the gutsy invitation, "Click here if you dare to experience my singing voice," linked to an mp3 of him crooning away in his dorm room. (He had a pretty good voice, actually.)

Select: Choosing the Best Evidence

When selecting material to include in your portfolio, the first principle you should consider is privacy and suitability. You should only upload material that you would like to be directly associated with your name, and you must carefully consider whether you want to give out personal information such as a mailing address or phone number (giving out your e-mail address is, of course, pretty standard). Some portfolio writers are even hesitant to put photos of themselves online (though others bravely display their prom pictures, no matter how cheesy the tux or how high the hair-do). If you’re especially concerned about privacy, you could cloak your portfolio contents by keeping the material password protected, and you must always be careful not to give out highly private information that others could use, such as your social security number. A final point about privacy is that it works both ways—you must respect the privacy of others as well. This means that you shouldn’t link to the pages of other individuals you know without their permission, and you also must attribute credit to any sources that you use, especially when borrowing material from someone else’s website or posting copyrighted images.

Secondly, to give your portfolio coherence and continuity, try to think of all the material you select as pieces of unified evidence arguing the case that you’re worth taking an interest in. Essentially, select material that inspires people to read and browse through your work, and choose artifacts that will demonstrate your growth over time (e.g., a paper from an introductory class as well as a senior thesis). Adopt an upbeat, welcoming tone ("In these pages, you’ll discover exactly what makes me tick"), but also maintain enough professionalism to keep an employer’s critical eye locked on your pages. Among the many portfolios I’ve browsed through, I’ve seen students take foolish risks such as publishing potentially embarrassing photographs (here I am, mooning my roommates), letting serious typos slip by ("Bachelor of Sciwence in Engginerring"), or revealing information that is too personal or leaves them open to judgment ("I’ve tried every beer on this list of 50 at least once, and some of them way too many times."). To emphasize the point of suitability, I’ve heard one instructor comment that you should only post something online if you’d be willing to show it to your grandmother. Though most students wouldn’t go this far (and presumably most grandmothers would be pretty forgiving anyway), perhaps a good benchmark is that you only post material that you can be proud of a year from now, especially if you intend to advertise the URL to employers.

Finally, when selecting material, recognize the value of piggybacking. In addition to posting pages such as your home page, your resume, essays and reports, project designs, and photos, keep in mind that you can readily link your pages to those that others have created. Where logical, provide relevant links to your program or course descriptions, personal organizations with which you’re affiliated, or pages that reflect your hobbies and personal interests.

Reflect: Being True to Yourself while Considering How You Come Across to Others

Good reflective writing is about reviewing what you’ve accomplished (or even what you’d like to accomplish someday) and projecting value. Students in technical fields often shy away from the concept of reflective writing, either out of unfamiliarity or because they hesitate to make private reflections public; yet reflective writing is standard and natural to most online portfolios. In fact, smart students realize that the portfolio is the safest place for reflective writing, in that it’s inappropriate to make subjective, personal comments in a technical paper, resume, or cover letter, while it makes perfect sense in a portfolio. In an online portfolio, you have the space and opportunity to share your thoughts on everything from your personal passions to discussing how you performed in a particular course. The rules for such reflection are flexible, but there are some rules nevertheless.

The first rule I recommend is being selective about where the reflection occurs, and how much of it you use. Reflecting about coursework right on your downloadable resume is neither conventional nor efficient, while trying to reflect on every single course you’ve taken as a student would be overwhelming both for you and your reader. However, creating a page that summarizes your experience and reflecting briefly on the value of each experience as you describe it makes perfect sense. ("I valued this job because it taught me how to analyze the network configuration needs of a small business." "This class taught me to use cascading style sheets—something I will apply to my future web designs.")

A second rule for good reflective writing is that it has a purpose both for you and your audience. Both you and your audience should be interested in commentary about why you chose your particular major, relationships (or the lack of them) that you see between your coursework and experience, and what sets you apart from others in terms of both training and life choices. In giving examples, especially related to your education, offer those that will demonstrate learning, change, empowerment, self-development, problem-solving, and results. Good examples are concrete, providing names, lists, scenarios, dates, definitions, etc. In the portfolios that I’ve reviewed, one student wrote an essay reflecting on how her intercultural understanding had been shaped by a year abroad, while another student wrote a few short poems defining his interest in engineering, and even created a sketch to accompany each poem. Still another student took an even bolder stroke—writing about lessons she’d learned about teamwork after being reprimanded by a co-op supervisor for working too independently. What these students are doing in the process of reflection is not only taking stock of their personal assessment of their growth, they’re also preparing themselves for the toughest of interview questions. ("Tell me about the greatest challenge you’ve faced in life." "Argue to me how your education prepared you to work at our company.") Ultimately, effective reflection online is about learning to speak well in the company of others.

Finally, look for opportunities to write reflective comments on any major portion of your portfolio, including the resume, papers and projects, photography, etc. The bottom line: If it’s worth a menu-based category in your e-portfolio, it’s probably worth reflective commentary.

Principles of Portfolio Design

Although the design of online portfolios can vary greatly, especially depending on the computer skills of the creator, I’ve found that the best portfolios share three traits: unity, navigability, and simplicity.

The more unified the pages of your portfolio are, the more likely we are to dwell there. Come up with a basic design and background for each page that is repeated on other pages, and keep associated items parallel with each other from one page to the next. Use headings for short blocks of text, and when you do need to use long blocks of text such as in a complete essay, provide a ready means for us to return to the root pages of your portfolio. If you’re handy with Dreamweaver or Frontpage, you can set up your portfolio so that when we exit to visit outside pages that you’ve linked to, these pages will open in a separate new window—thus when we click them closed we automatically return to your portfolio.

With these principles in mind, a unified design for one set of pages might go something like this: The page is entitled "My Design Projects," and it describes four projects you were involved in as part of your classwork and work experience. Each project has a short heading, written in boldfaced red text, followed by a short project description (just 3-4 lines long, in black text), and at the end of each description is the clickable line, "Click here to visit the project page." Between each description is a solid black line to enhance separation, and the background is white so that all text readily stands out. Also, at the left of each of these descriptions is a small screenshot (also clickable) of the page we’d visit to find out more about the associated project. Once we click to go into a specific project page, we see a "Click here to return to My Design Projects page" and a "Click here to return to my homepage" link at the top of the page. This basic form is repeated on other associated pages, and thus we have a strong sense of unity to your portfolio no matter what pages we are visiting.

Assuming a unified portfolio, one of the best ways to aid users in navigation is also the simplest—use icons and menus. We’re used to thinking of icons as clickable, and we intuitively use menus—whether they appear at the top of the page or on the left side—to help us quickly drive through cyberspace. Many portfolio writers make sure the same clickable menu appears at the top of each portfolio page, with typical menu contents including simple, rapidly identifiable terms such as "Home," "Resume," "Major," "Projects," "Coursework," Computer Skills," "Work Experience," "Interests."

Beyond a menu or icon-driven strategy, you make your pages easier to navigate by creating a clear visual hierarchy on each page, by avoiding root pages that require a large amount of scrolling, and making sure that we have clickable links readily available on every page. Most portfolio designers also avoid using frames, in that they create multiple scrollbars on the same page, and you run the risk of having your viewer miss one of the scrollbars or becoming confused about how the frames are related. Also, if your portfolio is optimized for a particular version of Netscape, Explorer, or Firefox, you should make your reader aware of that fact right on your homepage, and perhaps even provide a clickable link where the appropriate software can be downloaded.

Finally, you’ve probably come across Thoreau’s edict to "simplify, simplify," and we’re all familiar with the KISS principle. Many portfolio creators violate that basic principle to "keep it simple, stupid." Too many are tempted by the trappings of the web, filling their pages with cute but tiresome animations, too many different blaring colors (called an "angry fruit salad" by web designers), and slow-loading, distracting backgrounds. Such tactics merely increase the odds that we’ll turn away from your pages. Ultimately, the best portfolios are those most artfully simple in design, welcoming us at a glance to sit back, relax, click, and spend some virtual time with you.

 

Few people relish interviews, and it is easy to respond to them by being either overly nervous or even overly cocky. It is important, then, to prepare for an interview as you prepare for any test. Incredible resources are available to you, including websites where you can "practice" by choosing among various responses to tricky interview questions, your school’s Career Services staff, and technology that allows you to videotape yourself doing a mock interview. With all these resources, I’ll keep my advice here brief, focusing on oft-overlooked fundamentals.

Basic Tips for Interviews

• Carefully review your resume and cover letter to prepare for the interview, and anticipate the kinds of questions that these documents might inspire from a stranger. It’s surprising how many candidates forget that the resume and letter they sent might be right there in front of the interviewer.
• Read company literature and review any personal correspondence you’re received from the company. Of course, research the company’s web presence heavily, and go beyond the company’s webpage—read publications by company members or search a newspaper local to the company for its mention.
• Be prompt, neat, and courteous, dressing appropriately for the occasion even if it’s simply a career fair at your school. Believe it or not, I’ve had recent graduates who came back to the school on recruiting trips cite this issue to me as their number 1 concern. I recall one recent graduate turned recruiter saying after a long day of career fair interviewing, "I wish to god they’d just be on time, cover their tattoos, and remove their piercings."
• Listen attentively and speak thoughtfully—do not rush yourself, and don’t be afraid of a bit of dead air if it helps you to think before speaking. Try to sense when you have fully answered a question and then distinctly stop rather than trail off into mumbled uncertainty.
• Be prepared to ask relevant questions. You will likely be expected to do so, showing that you have an inquisitive mind and a genuine interest.
• Express enthusiasm, but be realistic about your expectations of the job.

Common Mistakes Made During Interviews

• Criticizing yourself, partly to show humility even when it isn’t expected.
• Interrupting the interviewer’s questions or speaking out of turn.
• Overselling your case, trying to be too funny or too personal, or intentionally acting cocky to make an impression.
• Making uninvited or elaborate promises that are inappropriate for the circumstances.
• Drawing out the interview beyond its scheduled time frame or otherwise trying to control its pace.
• Lingering over questions that can better be addressed later, such as fringe benefits or starting salary.
• Speaking either too colloquially or too formally.

Qualities That You Can and Should Enhance in an Interview:

• Communication and technical skills.
• Motivation and willingness to accept responsibility.
• Self-confidence, decisiveness, stability, maturity, amiability, and loyalty.
• Perseverance, energy, common sense, and tact.

The Top Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Rejected:

• Lack of enthusiasm and interest; no evidence of initiative; no goals; lack of maturity.
• Poor personal appearance; extreme or careless dress.
• Poor scholastic record or few extra-curricular activities without reasonable explanation.
• Excessive interest in salary, benefits, or promotion.
• Lack of interest in or knowledge of the company.
• Poor presentation of self; therefore, lack of poise, awkward personality, abrasive manner, lack of confidence, timid approach, arrogant or conceited attitude, poor speech habits.