gather supporting Material 3.6 37
any more than 50 tons of cement is a skyscraper.”^3 Supporting material should
be personal and concrete, and it should appeal to your listeners’ senses.
• Personal. Support your ideas with stories based on your own experiences.
As Don Hewitt, one of the creators of the television show 60 Minutes
revealed, one secret to his success as a communicator has been telling stories.^4
Everyone likes a good story.
• Concrete. Relating abstract statistics to something tangible can help to com-
municate your ideas more clearly. You could give your listeners an idea that
snack food is a big business by saying that Frito-Lay sells 2.6 billion pounds
of snack food each year, but you make your point truly memorable by adding
that 2.6 billion pounds is triple the weight of the Empire State Building.^5 Or
to make a point about teenagers and safe driving, you could point out that
the number of teens killed in car accidents in the United States each year is
the same as if 12 fully loaded jumbo jets crashed each year.^6
• Appealing to the senses. Provide vivid descriptions of things that are tangi-
ble so that your audience can visualize what you are talking about. Besides
sight, supporting material can appeal to touch, hearing, smell, and taste.
The more senses you trigger with words, the more interesting your talk will
be. A description such as “the rough, splintery surface of weather-beaten
wood” or “the sweet, cool, refreshing flavor of cherry Jell-O” evokes a sen-
sory image.
How does a public speaker find interesting and relevant supporting mate-
rial? By developing good research skills. President Woodrow Wilson once ad-
mitted, “I use not only all the brains I have, but all that I can borrow.” Although
it is important to have good ideas, it is equally important to know how to build
on existing knowledge.
In addition to becoming a skilled user of electronic and library resources,
you will also learn to be on the lookout as you read, surf the Internet, watch
TV, and listen to the radio for ideas, examples, illustrations, and quotations that
could be used in a speech. Finally, you will learn how to gather information
through interviews and written requests for information on various topics.
Gather Visual Supporting Material
For many people, seeing is believing. Besides searching for verbal forms of sup-
porting material, you can seek visual supporting material. Almost any presenta-
tion can be enhanced by reinforcing key ideas with visual aids. Today there are
many technologies, such as PowerPointTM, PreziTM, and KeynoteTM, for display-
ing visual aids. Often, however, the most effective visual aids are the simplest:
an object, a chart, a graph, a poster, a model, a map, or a person—perhaps you—
to demonstrate a process or skill.
In Chapter 14, we offer some basic advice about using presentation aids:
Make your visual images large enough to be seen, and allow plenty of time to