University of South Florida Sunscreen and Sun Safety Presentation

The scenario

You’ve landed a great job as a lifeguard at the community swimming pool in your town. The pool director knows from your application that you’re a biology major with an interest in public health. The pool has a rotating lifeguard staff of 25, mostly college students. The director has asked you to give a presentation to the group on sun safety. In addition to a 12-15 minute talk, she’s asked you to prepare a one-page handout. The goal is to encourage the staff to be good role models for pool users when it comes to sun protection and to remind the staff that drowning isn’t the only risk associated with pools and the beach; so is sunburn and skin cancer.

The assignment

Usings all the resources and links available in this module, write a speech to accompany your presentation. Given that you should speak about 125 words a minute, your talk should be about 1000. In addition to your written talk, prepare some visuals as part of the presentation. You can use PowerPoint if you’d like. You don’t not have to actually record your talk. Submitting the text of it is fine. But be sure it written for speaking, not for reading. It should be conversational and somewhat informal, but not over-the-edge loose or chatty. If need be, you can submit the PowerPoint or visuals and the talk separately.

You have a lot of leeway on how you interpret this assignment. If you do a PowerPoint, you can use the notes feature to write your “speech.” Alternatively, you can make visuals to accompany a written speech. You don’t have to actually deliver the speech. But you need to include both the text and the visuals in your submission.

Suggested strategies

Remember the goals your talk.
Remember. You are not a physician or medical profession (yet) and therefore cannot give medical advice. Do some research on this, and make the appropriate disclaimer in your presentation.
Before you begin, take stock of your audience and how to best capture its attention.
Knowing that a blended approach almost always works best, consider the approaches shown in Sunscreen in Four Acts. Your presentation will include some hard scientific information, some emotional appeal, some explanation of concepts, and other strategies.