The Rules of Attraction: My Contribution to the Group Presentation

My group was responsible for the in-class discussion of The Rules of Attraction. In preparation for our presentation, I took detailed notes as I read, taking careful note of who the main characters were as well as their relationships with each other and minor characters. Once everyone in our group had finished reading the novel, we met to discuss what we wanted to do as far as a presentation. We held group meetings after each class meeting for two weeks prior to our presentation to make sure everything went smoothly; I was present at each of these.

Early on I suggested that we find ways to make the class want to participate more, such as dividing the class into teams if we did a game-show-like presentation format so that the spirit of competition might encourage more participation. For a while the idea of using a Who Wants To Be A Millionaire format was tossed around and I even searched online for various Millionaire PowerPoint templates that might work well, but in the end it was decided that the game show format would not be conducive to lengthy discussions and so we went with a basic PowerPoint which would simply display our questions so the class could refer back to them.

Each member of our group was responsible for a different set of questions. I was responsible for creating discussion-inducing questions regarding Ellis’s characters and his stylistic choices in writing The Rules of Attraction. I came up with ten questions in all, of which six were used in our PowerPoint presentation, and I believe five of these questions were actually asked during class discussion.

Overall I feel our presentation went well. I only wish that the class had been more participatory near the end of our discussion; I could tell that the people who always raised their hands were getting tired of being the only ones answering our questions.