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.
Dr. Matt McGarrityPrincipal Lecturer
