Oral Skills: Courses flagged for Oral Skills reinforce students' ability to orally communicate ideas to an audience. Oral skills include the ability to understand and engage in a discipline's discourses and rhetorical situations by delivering formal oral presentations or performances and to express and interpret ideas—both their own and those of others—in clear oral presentations or performances. In order to build upon the foundational oral skills developed in the First Year Seminar and Rhetorical Arts courses, students must take one (1) course satisfying the oral skills flag.
Assignments that develop oral skills must account for at least 20% of the total course grade to qualify a course to satisfy the flag for oral skills. This may be a single presentation or performance or by a combination of assignments throughout the semester. These assignments should require:
- Advance preparation and/or rehearsal
- The analysis of the audience and context
- Evaluation of preparatory materials
- And the actual presentation and/or performance.
Examples include (but are not limited to):
- Persuasive speeches
- Research presentations
- Technical presentations
- Theatrical performances
- Presenting a lesson