I chose a Ted Talk on solitary confinement. The speaker argues that solitary confinement in our US prisons equates to the same level of torture we think about when looking at rivaling nations and their history of torture such as Iran. The speaker talks about how the government doesn’t treat the two as the same and depicts it to the public as just a form of punishment because of the amenities provided by a prison that you may not find in places created to torture someone. However, it is written in international policy that holding someone for 15 or more days in solitary confinement constitutes as torture; there are US prisoners who have spent thousands of days in US prisons. The Ted Talk was very informative and is definitely helpful in expanding one’s knowledge on the issue if they were unfamiliar before hand.
The speaker’s strength is that the presentation is structured well with heavy information combined with anecdotes. However, I also believe the tone in which she spoke hurt her presentation in that more often then not it was monotone. That is dangerous because you run the risk of losing the gage of those who are only loosely interested; you can turn them off if they feel unattached to the presentation at hand. Overall though I would categorize this presentation as “delivering a speech” and not just doing a presentation.