Poise: Our presenter was well poised, in such a way that I felt he had made himself seem comfortable when speaking to us. For most of the conversation that we shared with him he was sitting down, so I assumed he was relaxed an that gave off a relaxed feeling to the audience. With that being said, "A second dimension of poise is the speaker’s ability to connect with the audience. A really engaging speaker makes eye contact, may invite audience participation or at least audience questions" . He did that. He allowed us to ask questions about his life and his work and when done answering he would begin to ask us similar questions.
Clarity: He was very clear when speaking, he pronounced his words well and was heard because he projected his voice. Though at times he would stumble or stutter, but it was expected when presenting can be hard. Or he would sometimes us larger words, that I did not necessarily know the meaning of, but that was also expected considering he is a journalist and gets paid to use big, fancy, sophisticated words that describe his stories well. Also he had very interesting stories to tell, his stories were described well and said in a way that brought great understanding to the listeners.
Volume: His volume throughout the whole conversation was a healthy medium, he did not scream nor whisper and I found that he projected his voice well. His voice also remained fairly stable throughout the presentation, I did not noticed any fluctuations in volume.
Information: He did not have short answers, he talked for a while making sure he had fully answered the question asked while adding in some extra information relating to the topic. He is an interesting man with many great stories to tell, and the questions asked were wonderful and really made a clean path for him to shine and reflect on some of his proudest and most interesting memories. For example; Our presenter talked about one of his stories in detail, he spoke of the 9-11 event that took place at the twin towers and how he reported there.
Organization: Our presenter did not purposely go off on tangents. He stayed on topic well, but their was this one moment while presenting where another student asked a question that stirred up some controversy. The conversation was based on whether newspapers are even necessary because we have twitter and other easy social networking sites found on the internet that cover the day-to-day current events that we need to know, these sites make it quick and easy to find information. The feud was short lived because the presenter knew that the whole audience would not appreciate him going off into a whole different conversation with a student looking for trouble and then disregarding everyone else's needs. I appreciated that and was grateful that he got around to most of my fellow classmates questions.
My Role: I asked the question; "Within your work, Is there a moment that your are most proud of?" He didn't answer immediately but soon after rattled off a couple of moments that he was proud of in his line of work. I was glad that he had answered my question, I thought my question was thought provoking and I listened closing to the answers he gave me. Our class ran the conversation till the end, there were few moments though where we found gaps filled with silence, but towards the middle of class we all really found questions that we wanted answered and nearly half of the classes hands flew up every time we thought he was ready to call on someone again. Although there was always a specific group of people that repeatedly raised there hands, and others did not. It is sad that they did not try to participate because this was a great opportunity. And although we did have limited time some people should have at least raised their hands and tried to ask this talented man a question.
Recommendation: I would recommend Paul Grondahl to speak again because this man has many interesting stories to tell and our class alone did not even touch on half of them, and I feel these stories need to be shared.
