Here I am again at my station, but with an early walk behind me. It was just too tempting outside for my computer entry to take precedence. I walked about eight blocks, took some photos and bought a paper.

Last night I marked up with four daily entries since the start of this month and posted them on my website. This week I intend to finish my essay on Manichaeism, which I was not able to complete in time for my presentation yesterday.

This presentation titled “Mani’s Lost Message” did not come off as well as I had hoped. During the presentation itself I felt disorganised and rushed. The latter was due to my rushing for half an hour to get the room ready unassisted before the start. The disorganisation at the platform was due to my not having scanned my talk notes before starting and reliance on two set of notes to refer to as I spoke. I had never done this before and won’t do that again!

Giving the whole presentation some more thought, I unearthed the following points. The material presented was too complex because of the many unusual ideas that Manichaeism harbours and too extensive in content. I should have broken the whole subject up into at least two presentations and kept them simpler.

Giving the whole presentation some more thought, I unearthed the following points. The material presented was too complex because of the many unusual ideas that Manichaeism harbours and too extensive in content.

I had trouble gaining a good grasp on the subject material, while I was studying it and shifted perspectives several times in composing my essay, a warning sign in retrospect. I also was not able to develop a clear narrative for oral presentation to give them a message to take away with them.

In short the amount of subject material was too large and complex for the one hour framework I had available. I did finish on time, but Mani’s message was lost in the poorly structured presentation.

However, the essay is not finished and I will spend the coming week on completing it, before starting to prepare for my next talk, six weeks from yesterday. All in all, it is a lesson learned! However, I still have a question for myself to resolve. How do I assess the subject material complexity and quantity ahead of time, as to its suitability for a one hour presentation and the intended audience?
<10:00 and 10:28am~