How to make the most boring lecture exciting
Why do all fairy tales begin with phrase ‘Once upon a time…’?
The answer is relevant for anyone who gives presentations: to the sociolinguist William Labov, if we weave hard facts into narrative patterns,
associations with well-known fairy tales are evoked in our memories which remind us the pleasure of listening to them. With the sequence that our attention span increases. Classic fairy tales follow a particular sequence:
– Abstract: how does it begin? (‘Once upon a time…’)
– Complicating action: who/where/when? (‘A King and a Queen had a daughter…’)
– Resolution: solution (‘Then he stopped and kissed Sleeping Beauty. And she opened her eyes for the first time in many, many years…’)
– Evaluation: what results from it? (‘And they lived happily ever after!’)
– Coda: what remains? (‘And the moral of the story…’)
A lecture should be structured along the same lines. The idea is not new. Aristotle was already aware of the importance of emotion in speech-making.
And in 1984 the communication researcher Walter Fisher came up with a radical thesis:
people do not want logical arguments, they want good stories.
Our life is not an Excel spreadsheet – it is a story with ups and downs.
Fisher’s idea is summed up in his famous ‘narrative paradigm’, which represents a break with classical rhetoric:
we do not evaluate a story on the basis of arguments, but on the basis of how much we trust or believe in the story (can I identify with the subject or the people?) and its coherence (does the story make sense?)
Chris Anderson, the inventor of TED, says something similar about the three rules for a perfect TED talk:
1) Don’t talk about a concept, a deficiency or a product; talk about an idea.
2) Focus on just one idea.
3) Talk about the idea in such a way that people will want to tell others about it.
The next time you have to say something in front of other people, start your talk with this sentence:
‘Let me tell you a short story…’ or ‘On the way here, something strange happened to me…’
Pages 24-25, The Communication Book, 44 ideas for better conversations every day, Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschappeler
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