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…