The authors suggest that incorporating the given-new contract will allow teachers to “seamlessly integrat[e] work on visual and oral communication into the routine of our writing courses” (93). The “‘given-new contract’ [assumes that] in order to understand anything, people must be able to integrate new information into their existing knowledge, attitudes, and values – all of which constitute a given” (93). So, effective oral presentations, according to Katz and Odell, will make use of this contract by presenting the audience information they (the audience) take as given and then build new information off of these givens. They imply that “givens” applies both to information the audience believes to be true as well as to the questions they are likely to ask about the speaker’s topic.
After establishing the given-new contract, Katz and Odell walk through an example of an oral presentation and examine the speaker’s engagement with the audience, use of verbal cues, use of visual cues (on the PowerPoint) and creation of appropriate voice; as they analyze these features of the presentation, they show how Dave (the speaker) employs the contract structure both verbally and visually. In their push for the use of both visual and verbal content, the authors emphasize that
Dave has three different modes of communication working together: the words he is saying (and which he wrote to be
spoken aloud), the words that he put on his slides (which he wrote to be read silently), and the visual features of those
slides: images, color, layout, font choice, and so forth…By using a multimodal approach, Dave increase the chance that
his audience will retain the information he is presenting to them. The modes work together to help him produce an effective presentation. (105-6)
Though the authors use PowerPoint in their classes, they state in their notes, “Our discussion is not intended to promote the use of PowerPoint per se, but to demonstrate rhetorical strategies that can help students develop effect oral presentations with appropriate visual accompaniment regardless of the specific tools used to create the presentation” (108-9).