Creating the multimodal research presentation felt like a massive undertaking. The research essay itself was a lot of work, and the task of compiling ten weeks of work into a coherent, aesthetically appealing presentation was daunting. Before completing the presentation, I had no idea how helpful it would be for my research.

I started my presentation as a summary of my essay, essentially copying and pasting sentences from my draft and attaching them to slides. This was really frustrating, because I felt like I was just repeating myself in a busywork assignment that wouldn't advance my argumentation or thinking. Eventually, I came to find out that the reason this process felt so useless was because I was doing it completely wrong. Once Dr. Morse informed me that the assignment was meant to be a presentation about process and not a review of essay content, I realized the value in completing the assignment. As I worked through it, I was forced to isolate the most important ideas from my research. I had to evaluate my ideas in order to determine which were absolutely necessary, and which were extra. In doing so, I refined my arguments, my thesis, and the organization of my ideas in a way that resulted in a much more organized flow of concepts. In terms of the presentation itself, I had a difficult time accepting that I wasn't going to be able to simply read off of my essay, but rather I had to articulate the behind-the-scenes aspects of my project and all of the work I've been putting into it over the course of the quarter. In all honesty, this presentation assignment was far more helpful than I anticipated, I am happy with the result, and I think it put me on a trajectory that will ultimately allow me to write an essay I am happy with as well.