How to make the most boring lecture exciting
Why do all fairy tales begin with the phrase ‘Once upon a time ...’?
The answer is relevant for anyone who gives presentations: according 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 of the pleasure of listening to them. With the
consequence that our attention span increases. Classic fairy tales follow a
particular sequence:
· Abstract: how does it begin? (‘Once upon a time ...’)
· Orientation: who/where/when? (‘A king and queen had a daughter ...’)
· Complicating action: the problem to be solved (‘But all around the
castle, a hedge of thorns started to grow ...’)· Resolution: solution (‘Then he stooped 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 same lines. The idea is not new.
Aristotle (see ‘Theory of Rhetoric’) was already aware of the importance
of emotion in speech-making. And in 1984 the communication researcher
Walter Fisher came up with a radical thesis: people do not want logical
arguments; they want good stories. Our life is not an Excel spreadsheet – it
is a story with ups and downs. Fisher’s idea is summed up in his famous
‘narrative paradigm’, which represents a break with classical rhetoric: we
do not evaluate a story on the basis of arguments, but on the basis of how
much we trust or believe in the story (can I identify with the subject or the
people?) and its coherence (does the story make sense?).
Chris Anderson, the inventor of TED, says something similar about the
three rules for a perfect TED talk: 1. Don’t talk about a concept, a
deficiency or a product; talk about an idea. 2. Focus on just one idea. 3.
Talk about the idea in such a way that people will want to tell others about
it.