I spend a fair bit of my time helping people polish up their talks. I don't, in some cases, I'm not writing the talks but they'll run it and I'll just watch it and provide some feedback, coaching on it. And, when I'm taking notes probably the most common thing that I'm putting in my notes is you need more examples. Examples, analogies, illustrations, stories, whatever. These are the things that make a speech easier to understand, or relate to, or easier to follow. And I think one of the things that separates experts from novices is simply, how many examples they know and how many they can quickly rattle off in a talk? So, what we're going to do in this video is talk about some strategies for including short and long examples in your talks. So let's start by talking about short examples. When I say short, I mean, I'm in usually in that sort of 1 to 3 sentence neighborhood. In this talk itself, these are usually just kind of quick asides that simply elaborate on an idea. And since they're short, they only elaborate clarify so much and so I find these are very useful for stuff like definitional issues. So if I'm in a talk and I introduce a term that might not be hard to understand, it just might be new for this particular audience, I'll drop in a quick example there. And I see this a lot too. So recently, I was working with someone on business intelligence. So, they were doing a speech called business intelligence which as a term, I find hilarious, as opposed to business stupidity. No, how do we get more business stupidity? We don't, let's go with business intelligence. Aha, that's why you're in business. That was a smart decision. Nice little aside there. Anyways, business intelligence, as I learned in this talk, is a term for collecting and analyzing business information. And, this guy was doing an explanation of business intelligence and big data. And, he sort of, kind of stuck to the general terminology. What big data is and how his firm crunch big data into usable reports? So, I get that, I can understand that. But, I didn't have a sense for the scale that we were talking about in that talk. So I said hey, you know what, you should do it. Just drop in a couple of short examples about the types of things that come across your desk. So, when he introduces that term, business intelligence, he can now jump over and do a couple of quick examples so we have a better idea. So he can say something like do again. So we do business intelligence work. So we start off with the client's raw data. And now that raw data can be anything. It can be shipping information for a national company and maybe they just want to see how efficient they're being. It can be demographic data for a newspaper so they can figure out who and where their customers are. The main thing is, that the client has a lot of data and in fact, they've got too much data for them to make sense initially and that's where we come in. That's kind of what I recommended. That has two short drop-in examples. They're just there to give the listener a general sense for what you have in mind when you say raw data. And, these examples don't have to be comprehensive, right, they just need to give the listener somewhere to start their understanding. And without these examples, I'm listening for a hint, for what this thing that you're talking about might actually look like. Now when you do these, these examples should include visual details whenever possible. The more I can make the examples visual, the better. I want listeners to be able to picture what this idea looks like. Now, I'll be honest, I often don't write out my short examples so if I'm speaking and I suddenly feel the need to drop in a short clarifying example, I almost always do. They don't cost much in terms of time and they kind of break up that content a little bit. I would say that these short examples tend to cluster around the beginnings of points because that's usually where you're introducing new ideas and terminology. But honestly they can be dropped in wherever. So, that's some stuff on short examples. So, let's go ahead and turn to long examples. Now, long examples are like planning out more. So a long example might run five sentences or longer and these tend to have more variability. One thing you can do with long examples is they can anchor a section. I might talk about a concept for a few minutes and then I'll walk it through an example and then, maybe go through conclude the point by highlighting a few ways that the example illustrates the concept. Let me show you an example of those. So, when I talk about the concept of framing language, I will normally stand up five to seven minute or so about how framing language works. So, that's my conceptual portion of this point. Then, I'll turn to an example. I'll watch a clip of something usually presidential speech. Then, I'll spend maybe another five minutes showing how that example illustrated the concept, right? So I've got a then b then a plus b, right? So, in that case, that example is the anchor. It dominates the discussion at that point. So that's one way you can use them. You can also use examples are structuring devices. So instead of giving the example and then giving the explanation, you can interlace those two. So, examples are often the difference between good speeches and great ones. So, you don't want to be stingy with them. I don't think you should look at a speech and go, I'll include an example in my talk. No, no, no, no. I think in that speech you never want to be too far from an example, right? So you want to pepper them liberally throughout the entire speech. And you include lots of short examples without really changing much else to the speech. So let's say you've already kind of prepped your manuscript, you can easily go in and add short examples after the fact. You just hunt through and you find the places where they've really worked well. So that's easy to do. Nevertheless, I think you should consider using long examples, they take more in terms of time, they take more in terms of planning but, the payoff can be bigger. [MUSIC]
