Background:
Choosing your stories
A. Create a story: Scholar Walter Fisher says that humans understand themselves and the world around them through stories. Audiences, therefore, relate to stories. In trying to create identification with your audience, stories are your most powerful assets.
Think about people, events, anecdotes, or hypothetical (imagined but possible) situations you could you use to help tell the story of your speech.
Can you work a story into your introduction? It could be used in the attention getter or in one of the other sections of the introduction.
What stories best represent the first category of experiences you are highlighting? The second category or experiences? The third? Don’t be limited by what you saw in the samples; expand on the stories.
Focus on the questions Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?
Sometimes we forget our outlining skills when outlining stories. Remember you should still use single sentence points with good coordination and subordination. Here’s an example:
II. My personal life now revolves around being a grandma
A. You’d think that would be a safe place to be, but for me, it carries it’s own hazards and harms (alliteration).
1. For example, I joined my granddaughters on a ropes course the last time we spent time together.
2. They navigated rope bridges, swinging “vines,” and zippy zip (alliteration) lines with the ease of native monkeys (metaphor)
3. I, however, missed the landing on a swinging “vine,” and crashed into a platform with my knee, rendering me bruised and hobbling.
B. I couldn’t kneel for a week because of the purple bruise covering my calf, but that didn’t stop me from praying that I’ll survive to see their teenage years!
(notice the highlighted examples of figurative language – alliteration and metaphor)
Assignment –
Click on “write submission” and type into the text box or type into a word document and answer each of these questions completely:
1. What story would fit best in the introduction of your speech? How can you tell it in a short, but engaging way?
2. What is a story you could incorporate into the first section of your speech? Is there anything related to that value, experience, or person that would be entertaining to your virtual audience? Anything from which they could learn?
3. What is a story you could incorporate into the second section of the speech? Is there a story that captures the value or experience you are highlighting?
4. What is a story you can incorporate into the third section of your speech? What story gives the audience a good picture of why this experience, person, animal, or thing is important to you?
5. Choose one of your stories and outline it with complete, single-sentence points (Refer to the above short example, if needed):
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