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Sustaining interest

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Presentation skills: Speechwriting and Storytelling

National Research Tomsk State University

4.6 (132 ratings) | 11K Students Enrolled

Course 1 of 4 in the Presentation Skills: Speechwriting, Slides and Delivery Specialization

“99% presentations suck!”, — said Apple former evangelist Guy Kawasaki in 2005. Up to now the situation hasn’t improved yet. Why? Most public speaking courses focus on “how” instead of “what & why”. How to stand, walk and talk during delivery with little attention paid to “what” — the quality of storytelling itself. Thereby a usual result is a looking slightly confident speaker with mesmerizing voice delivering an obscure mess of facts, figures and claims. In this course we take a more systematic approach, focusing on the content. How to structure your ideas, facts and data into a logical convincing story using a narrative structure. This course covers fundamentals of scriptwriting, packing, argumentation and language. This course is not about how to fabricate a catching tale, but rather how to structure your ideas, facts and data into an interesting story you are going to tell during your presentation.

Reviews

4.6 (132 ratings)

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NM

Jan 09, 2018

Really good course, helped me structure storytelling and presentations which is invaluable going forward.

A

Apr 09, 2019

Really a life learning experience. Will help a lot if one needs to grow professionally in this career.

From the lesson

Part 2: Sustaining interest

This week is about the storytelling and how to apply it to your presentation content. What a story is in a nutshell. Why stories are the best form of conveying information. How to create a conflict. How to sustain interest of the audience during your middle part of the presentation.

Sustaining interest. Stories.1:57

What's a story structure?6:56

How do we create conflict?4:32

"They are the problem"7:44

"We are the problem"2:57

"Your thinking is the problem"4:57

Sustaining interest4:40

What do you do once you found a conflict?7:13

Taught By

Alexei Kapterev
Lomonosov MSU BS

Problems is a way to attract a lot of attention but how do we keep

that attention, how do we sustain interest throughout the presentation.

Well, we see there's a way of looking at presentations and it involves two axis.

The vertical axis is about emotions plus being all things bright and

beautiful like joy and hope and well you get the idea,

minus being all things negative like fear, anxiety, and despair,

things like that, and vertical axis, I'm sorry, horizontal axis is of course time.

Now, reports should be like that, reports involve no emotional work.

The audience should be doing all the work because

they are the one requesting a report.

Now, presentations are not like this and what I see in presentations,

what I see in bad presentations is this.

This is a very typical situation where you have some good news and some neutral news.

And then some good news and then some neutral facts, information.

And then once again, and that long plateau over there,

this is where the audience dies, this is where they fell asleep,

this is where they start to hate the speaker, this is where the dread begins,

this is where they go an check their email, their Facebook, etc.

So, what we should do instead.

We should strive for dynamics.

This is a good story, it has a huge problem and

then it has a solution, and then people live happily ever after, right?

And this is just one of the examples.

This is another example where you have some good news, and

then a huge problem, and then a solution.

One more example, you start low, then you bring the audience up and

then you drop the energy down, and then you can lift it up again which

of course is a scenario for Cinderella, right?

This is an old fairytale by Grimm Brothers, and

there are lots and lots of stories shaped like this.

This is a very typical presentation,

Four mistakes, could be five or ten, I don't know.

Four dreads of project management, for example, problem, solution, problem,

solution, problem, solution.

Now, you have to have four problems for that presentation,

and then needed to sustain the attention of the audience.

This is my own presentation called Death by PowerPoint, and it is shaped,

well, more or less like the story of Cinderella where I have this

huge build up and then dropping down and then rising up again.

Folks from the university of Vermont came up with those six forms,

they say that most of these stories, they've analyzed them,

they've analyzed literally thousands of stories.

This is all machine learning.

They say these are the basic shapes and what unites them all is dynamism.

They move somewhere.

They change something and this is what we should strive for.

You see, this is a very typical beginners problem where

you have some conflict in the beginning of the presentation but

then once again, things slow down and

you have this long plateau over there where nothing much happens.

And how would you fight with that?

Well, you find additional problems.

A typical solution by Steve Jobs to this problem is to decompose this huge

problem to lots of small ones and then sprinkle your whole presentation

with little problems and go ahead solving them one by one.

So, those little sub-problems are crucial for sustaining attention of the audience.

And if you zoom in and if you look at a very small bit a presentation,

it is also shaped like a story, there are lots of little problems and

little solutions there and this is how you engage the audience

even though the big problem was long long time ago, so

far people might not even be able to remember where it was

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