What is a story?

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From the course by University of Washington

Speaking to Inspire: Ceremonial and Motivational Speeches

15 оценки

University of Washington

Speaking to Inspire: Ceremonial and Motivational Speeches

15 оценки

Course 4 of 4 in the Specialization Dynamic Public Speaking

The most memorable speeches inspire, entertain, and praise. By blending stories and eloquence, great speeches highlight the core values motivating an audience. You might need to do this in a keynote address, a eulogy, or simply a business meeting. Inspiring audiences is a common, but difficult writing challenge. You want a speech that elevates the topic and the audience. This course gives you a method for preparing and delivering speeches that inspire and entertain. By the end of this course, you should be able to compose and deliver moving speeches that praise core audience values through evidence, storytelling, and humor. You should be able to write eloquent passages in tones appropriate to the audience and occasion and speak fluidly from either a well-prepared manuscript or from memory. Learners will record speeches, providing and receiving peer feedback.

From the lesson

Week 1. Using values and storytelling to develop a great speech

Welcome! We begin this week with an overview of the course: What it is and what we’ll be doing. With a sense for the topic, we can then get to know each other with an introductory speech. It’s a fun and easy speech that allows you to get to know some of your classmates. From there we can start preparing our speeches. We’ll start by finding the core values that will drive the speech. Values that speak to the topic and inspire your audience. We’ll then explore how to discuss those values through evidence and storytelling. By the end of the week, you’ll have a list of values and stories to write a speech. If you want, you can end the week by telling us a story and getting some feedback on it. This is a longer week. The storytelling material goes better in week one than week two. If you feel a bit overwhelmed, just know that this week will have a bit more content than the other weeks.

What is a story?5:04

How stories help your speech6:12

Structuring your story3:22

What's the point of the story?8:38

Writing characters7:14

Writing description4:07

Transforming stories into anecdotes5:58

Meet the Instructors

Dr. Matt McGarrity
Principal Lecturer
UW Department of Communication

When ancient rhetoricians wanted to teach

public speaking they had students start by telling stories.

The multi-year standard speech giver curriculum was called the

progymnasmata and it began by having students retell fables,

these were just stories that they knew well and they did this to

practice timing and delivery and to get a good sense for language use.

And once their teachers decided that they were ready,

they would move on to narratives, writing their own stories.

Why did they spend so much time on this?

Well, because mastering the art of storytelling is essential to

good speaking and it's certainly essential to good ceremonial speaking.

We're going to use stories as one of the main ways we explain the values in our speech.

So, what is a story?

Obviously, we all know the answer to that, right?

We can distinguish good stories from bad ones,

interesting movies from boring ones,

but what is it?

Well, at its most elemental a narrative is

a representation of an ordered sequence of events.

Okay, that's a pretty simple definition but it has a lot of implications.

So narratives don't simply exist apart from their form.

If a narrative is a representation,

this representation gives us stuff like scene.

So we have a sense for where this thing is happening,

and characters who this stuff is happening to.

So we've got representation and ordering.

Well, that requires a narrator.

Now, in speaking this is you.

In a film it might be the camera.

Now, stories matter because they are the way

we as humans make sense of most of our day to day events, right?

Every day we're bombarded with bits of

information that we have to quickly absorb and make sense of.

Narrative provides us with a remarkably familiar and efficient method for doing so.

And this is probably why the French philosopher Jean Francois Leotard

called narrative the quintessential form of customary knowledge.

So yes, stories have remarkable power but not because they're magical or mystical.

We're not engaging in some sort of

tremendous link to the past and our Neanderthal brethren.

They work well because we know the form so unbelievably well.

So we clearly want stories,

but I think scope is an appropriate consideration.

What percentage of the speech is a story?

So at one end of the spectrum are works that only tell stories,

so fiction novels tell stories,

most movies tell stories,

90% of a movie is the story it's telling.

The story is the reason for the work and there's a ton written about storytelling,

volumes on screenwriting, it's all good stuff.

However, the times when your speech is only a story are probably rare.

Usually, we're using stories to advance some other goal and then

that gets us to when the narrative is the arrangement.

So here narrative is still the star of the show,

but there are other non-narrative elements present.

So when I work with scientists,

I typically use narrative arrangement for their research talks for public audiences.

So that means they just sort of narrate their research process.

Now, a scientific conference talk is going to take a different form,

it's going to focus on relevant literature, methodology,

basically it follows the research article as the arrangement model.

And that's fine, but for public talks I think a narrative mode works better.

We're going to be better able to understand that the findings are

relevant once we know the motivating problem and their process.

So lots of scientific TED Talks kind of do this narrative model.

Then finally, on the other side of the spectrum this is

where the narrative supports or elaborates on an idea.

So here we have narrative in a support role.

So these might allow me to discuss an idea in personal terms,

it might be there to provide a break, or some levity.

Politicians love the narrative aside.

At the State of the Union Address,

the president will be talking about some program or problem,

and then they'll dive into a short story explaining how this program

helped out this or that specific person and then they'll be like,

"Hello and behold, that person is with us tonight."

The camera pans over and the person stands up,

they're sitting right next to the First Lady, okay?

That's performing that story.

And for our purposes here,

we're using storytelling for our speeches.

Now, that's a slightly different task than writing a movie.

So maybe we're using storytelling as

an arrangement pattern but more likely we're using it as the key mode of elaboration.

But it's important to remember

a 30-second anecdote can't do the same things that a 90-minute movie can, right?

They're both stories, but they're different.

So all that stuff about twists in the late second act,

that's all great but if I've only got 30-seconds in my fifth paragraph,

I can't really use that.

I need to run with some basic narrative structure.

Now, it's structure nonetheless that narrative structure

works because we as humans are just so familiar with that form.

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