At this point in the process, you've probably got your outline. You've included some examples. You're trying to summarize your evidence. Well, that's great. But all of that work is on the page. And we need to think about how our audiences are going to hear and process this support in real time. Now in this video, we're going to talk about how to perform your support, giving audiences time to process this. Now, what we don't want to do is what I call data dumping. Now, data dumping is where the speaker ticks off all the evidence they have. Basically, they just read their outline, right, they state their claim, and then they dive immediately into the support. Let me show you an example of what I mean. So this is an old clip I had from a speaker talking about gun regulations. Hey man, this video's filmed in the United States, you're going to have some gun speeches. That's going to happen. Have to shoot my mouth off. Ba Zing. Anyway, go and take a listen to this clip here. >> Nearly 30,000 people die in the US by firearms each year, according to the US Center for Disease Control. 10,828 killed by homicide 16,599 by suicide, and 824 by accident. And this is in 1999 alone. 675,000 people have been killed by firearms in the US in the past two decades. Guns are powerful weapons, a means to kill both quickly and efficiently, and misused far too often. >> All right, so, to me, that's data dumping. There's some good information in that speech, but it goes by way too fast. As listeners, we're not really ready to hear it, and it's certainly too dense for us to easily parse. Now, if that talk was a handout or a flyer or an article, those same facts and figures would be great. Because we could simply mull over them, and then move on when we, the reader, were ready to. But that's not the case in speaking, is it? No. Because when we speak, we need to work in tandem with how audience members are going to hear the talk in real time. The more complicated the data, the evidence, the support, whatever, the more complicated that is, the more we have to prepare audiences to hear it. And then we gotta give them time to process it. What you might want to do is, you go back to your outline and you look at that. And you can't simply move from claim to support. We need to guide people through that. We want to fill the gaps between claim and support. And I call this filling the gap, I call these buffer sentences. And buffer, here, I mean, in the sense that they provide time and space between the dense portions of your talk. So let me show you an example of this. So, let's take a look at a bit of a talk from Elizabeth Warren. So, she's an American speaker. She's now a Massachusetts senator, but before that, she was a professor of law. And, she gave a number of talks about economic policy, and the banking industry and financial issues in general. And I was watching one of these talks and I was like, that's a great example of buffer sentences. So this bit here is from a talk about the American financial crisis. Which one you ask? Hm, take your pick. Anyway, here's what her outline would've looked like for this section of the talk, right? So you look at this outline. We've got a larger claim here about the middle-class families being support by two small sub-points. Family savings went down, and revolving debt went up. So this outline includes the bare minimum. If you just read this outline, it could take as little as 20 seconds. Now, the actual point ended up taking closer to three minutes. Why? Buffer sentences. Okay? So, here's some of the transcript from this actual chunk of talk. Right? So this is what she says here. She goes, my prediction should still hold. After all, families are getting richer, in the sense of more income over time. What happened? Savings went down in this same time period. So, the one-income family in 1970 was putting away about 11 percent of their take-home pay. Think about that. Week after week, month after month, they're putting away about 11 percent. By the year 2006, you'll notice that the line goes below zero. This is a concept only Alan Greenspan would love. Negative savings. The American family today puts away nothing. And, frankly, has been putting away nothing for the last five or six years. There's nothing there. There is no savings. All right, so that's, that's part of her talk here. Now take a look at sentences six through nine there. Those are the ones that say, think about that. Week after week. Month after month. They're putting away about 11 percent. So, those extra sentences, add nothing to the content. Nothing, zip, right? They just repeat that piece of evidence. So they don't add content, but they are essential to the talk. Because they allow the audience to process that evidence, that data. They give the listener another opportunity to think through savings of about 11 percent of family pay. So you take a look at this bit of transcript. Once those buffer sentences are done, she moves on to the next piece of evidence, followed by more buffer sentences, and so on and so forth. Now, if you were writing an essay, you would immediately cut those sentences as fluff. Right? They're unnecessary, potentially distracting. But in speaking, they are essential. They're what stand between a good speech that's easy to follow along with and mere data dumping. And when you summarize data, you're probably putting in buffer sentences. If you're coming up with short examples, those often work great as buffer sentences. No matter how you get there, the important thing to remember is to speak in tandem with how an audience member would hear and process your information. [MUSIC]
