EN7241 - Short Recorded Talk for a General Audience: Authorship and Authority: Assessment 1 Instructions

Assignment Brief 

This assessment is due by 12 noon on 19 February 2025 and is worth 10% of the module mark.
The assessment is to create a 500-word audio recording encouraging people to sign up to attend a talk. The focus is one author and one relevant  theory/concept/topic that you’ve encountered so far on Authorship and Authority. 

Your scenario is either:

(A) to create a 500-word podcast advertising a talk to an audience of 1st year undergraduate students on a literature BA who are invited to attend a special lecture 

(B) to create a 500-word a podcast advertising to the public about a free talk at a literary festival.
 A list of authors and concepts, topics or themes to pick from is below.

Your job is to:

1. Create an enticing and yet accurate title for the talk you are advertising
2. introduce the prospective audience to the author the talk will cover.
3.  introduce the theory/concept/topic it will cover, making it clear how this is related to the author.
4. quote at some point from a relevant text
5. make your audience want to attend the longer, in-person event.

You will need to think how to ‘hook’ in your audience. What is intriguing about this topic to them? Use appropriately pitched language, and include explanation of any terms that might be unfamiliar to your audience.  Further guidance on shaping a talk to an audience is at the end of this sheet.

At the start of your recording state your chosen scenario A or B and the title of the talk you're advertising. Put the title of the talk and your name on a single slide. This should be the only slide on your presentation. It's the equivalent of a podcast, so your voice (without slides) is what you'll be using to convey information.

The marking criteria used will be the English PGT Oral Assessment criteria, excluding the elements on ‘use of handout, visual or other aids’ and ‘responses to questions’ which are not part of this assessment. Particular weighting will be given to the ‘appropriateness to audience’ category.

Authors and topics:

Pick one author and one topic/ concept for that author from the lists below. You are free to adapt the topics and to rephrase them in ways that suit your audience.
Author: Olaudah Equiano
Concepts/ topics:  
(1) eighteenth-century publishing 
(2) abolitionist authorship 
(3) creating a persuasive authorial persona 
(4) establishing authority as a writer in challenging circumstances

Authors : Geoffrey Chaucer, Michel Foucault, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, the Beryn-poet (pick one)
Concepts/topics:
1) The idea of the 'author-function' (the rhetorical effects of evoking an author's name)
2) The historical development of authorship (how the status of 'author' is not fixed or universal, but historical and cultural)
3) The relationship between authorship and tradition (nationalism and authorisation)
4) The politics of authorship (how and why particular writers are promoted to the level of author)

Authors: Philip Sidney; Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson; John Milton (pick one) Concepts/topics: 
(1) representation of an authorial persona/speaker/narrator (main text; paratexts)
(2) rhetoric (how does the author try to persuade readers of their authority?) 
(3) education and the past (especially classical and biblical authority)
(4) innovation and subversion (e.g. originality, challenging convention)

Shaping a talk to a target audience.

For this assignment you need to address your talk to either
A) an audience of 1st year undergraduate students on a literature BA, who are being  invited to attend a special lecture 
(B) the public, advertising a free talk at a literary festival.

In both cases, you can assume audience members might know author’s name, but know very little about them and haven’t read anything by them (or, if they have read something, they don’t remember much about it).
First-year undergraduates are normally aged between 18 and 20. They have got a committed interest in literature, but have usually not studied much by way of literature before 1900.  Collectively, they will have read some Shakespeare plays, perhaps some 19th or 20th-century canonical English novels but you can’t assume they recall very much about these! Their motivation for attending a talk may be from a research interest or from pleasure.

Members of the general public who might be interested in attending a literary festival could be from any age group, but generally they will be older (in their 50s upwards). Their interest in attending is likely to come from pleasure and general cultural interest.  Again, the one major literary reference point they are likely to have some knowledge of is Shakespeare.

With both groups, your podcast itself needs to be clear and interesting, or they will turn it off.  If it’s not holding their interest, they won’t be turning up to the main event either.

Points to consider

1. The tone and register of your podcast need to be more informal than a talk pitched at an academic audience of scholars/MA students. You’re aiming to sound friendly, but also to come across as knowledgeable and authoritative about the topic.
2. When using terminology, you’ll normally need to include some form of tacit or explicit explanation of it. 
   If, for example, I just say ‘In the Regency period  British society was transformed by a European war’ a lot of people won’t know when ‘the Regency period’ was.  If I say ‘in the Regency period during the early nineteenth century, British society was transformed…’ that’s clearer. If I say ‘In the Regency period, when Jane Austen was writing, British society was transformed..’ , a lot of people will be able to sum up certain mental images of the time.  Mentioning  ‘the ‘early nineteenth century’ or ‘Jane Austen’ here are brief and tacit explanations of the term ‘Regency’.  It’s different from explicitly saying ‘The Regency period was between 1811 and 1820 when George III’s son was acting as regent, running the country in place of his father’. Explicit explanations like this are often needed, but if you include too many your audience may feel the pace is too slow or that you are patronising them or sounding like a teacher.
3. Your audience has only your voice to rely on, which means that you need to give your audience more than once chance  to hear and understand your most important points. This doesn’t mean repeating the same words.  I might start a talk by saying ‘At the university on Monday 25 October we’re running an exciting afternoon event…’ and end by encouraging people to sign up ‘to the talk at 2pm on Monday 25th October using the link below’.
4. Listeners normally find speakers too quick rather than too slow, so it is worth slowing your pace. You know the information you’re talking about well; listeners are hearing it for the first time, so need longer to process it.
5. Before you submit your recording check that the audio is at an easy volume to hear and that the recording is embedded and working correctly. Submitting to the module site is the equivalent of publishing a podcast – you wouldn’t make a talk public if you hadn’t checked the recording worked.

How to record.

Create a new powerpoint presentation and your single slide that has the title of the talk you are advertising, your name and the time, date and location of the main event you are advertising. Click on the ‘record’ button on the top menu to open the recording options.