At this point, you may be wondering why I chose an “Elevator Pitch” as your final exam project. You have read the announcement and the assignment sheet, haven’t you? You’ve scheduled your presentation, right? Good. Why did I choose this project as the final? I have a few reasons.
My traditional assignment for Rhetoric and Writing courses is an in-class presentation on the day of the final and portfolio folder that serves as a brainstorming activity for the presentation. This worked well as I found students seemed to offer more honest reflection in presentations than they did when writing reflective essays. Since reflecting on your experience and writing skills is the assignment’s goal, I’ve kept this assignment for many semesters.
In fact, I have several examples of just how honest students would be in their presentations. One semester a student discussed his progress by discussing each of the Writing Projects in the course. When he reached the third project he said, “Writing Project Three? I ain’t even gonna lie; my roommate wrote that for me.” Wait, what? So I changed his grade for that project to a zero. If I remember correctly, the paper was already a low D or an F, so his roommate didn’t do a very good job. He sent me an angry email asking about the grade and said that he was just joking about the comment. I replied, “No, no. You said ‘I ain’t even gonna lie,’ so I believed you.” There were other reasons I believed him. I never saw him working on his paper in class and the paper hadn’t really changed between the initial and final draft. (Don’t be this student.) Another student who resisted every exercise assigned to the class and consistently failed to perform well noted these issues in her presentation. It couldn’t have been easy to make these admissions to me and the class, but she did. In addition to these extreme examples, every semester I would also see students confirming my own observations of their performance. Some students would also surprise me and provide me with better understanding of the kinds of students they were.
Given the current situation, a longer presentation didn’t seem fitting. Thus, I decided on the Elevator Pitch type of presentation. I first learned about elevator pitches about ten years ago when I was co-directing a professional development group for teachers. An elevator pitch comes from the business world. The basic idea is that if you happen to be in an elevator with someone you’re trying to meet or with someone who could help your business, you’re ready to give them a brief, but effective, set of points about your product or service. That’s the reason for the short nature of the speech; you give it quickly enough to make it while riding in an elevator (or stopping someone in a hallway or in front of their office, etc). They then ask for more information, buy your product, adopt your plan, etc.
This type of speech fits the zoom model of our remote learning. You’ll prepare a series of points that highlight your strengths as a writer and the skills you’ll need to develop in the future and present them quickly (this is also good practice for answering questions in a job interview). This is much easier than giving a presentation in front of a class and even easier than writing a two-to-three-page essay reflecting on your writing experience. Hopefully, this eases the stress of your semester’s end.
If you unsure about what to discuss, think about what parts of the writing process were easiest for you? Analysis? Organization? Research? Development? Examples? Choose your strengths and discuss them. Once you’ve done this, you should discuss the areas of your writing that still need to work. How will you approach future writing tasks (in or out of schools)? You may be thinking, “Are you going to grade my opinions of my writing?” No, I’m not. You’ll be evaluated on how clearly you can make your points. I believe that each one of you should be able to do this at the A level. If you still have questions about your Elevator Pitch, email me.
