Presenters Can Learn From Script Writers
Most of the presentations we listen to are a tour de force of data and less than fascinating facts. Yet the rest of our lives are overflowing with dialogue. Today we will look at what we can do with dialogue to make our talks more interesting and impressive.
Normally when we give presentations, they tend to be pretty dry affairs. We marshal the facts, relate what happened, tell stories perhaps but in a one dimensional way. We are relating what happened, but are not making any attempt to bring it alive. However, what do we seek when we are looking for entertainment or education – we are looking for dialogue. Our television dramas, movies, novels, biographies are all using dialogue to good effect. We should include snippets of dialogue in our talks too.
Now we are not writing a screenplay, which is mainly dialogue, but that doesn’t mean we can’t drip a little bit in here or there in our talk to illustrate a point and bring it to life. We are taking the role of the narrator telling our audience what happened and then including the conversation we were hearing from the person we are featuring in the talk. We do this in normal conversation when we say, “she said that ‘it was preposterous idea and I will never have it mentioned under my roof again for as long as I live’”. We may even be telling this incident mimicking the style of the speech of the main protagonist, especially if they speak a dialect or with a heavy accent.
Why not do the same thing in our talks, to make our key point stronger? Let me give an example of something that happened to me in 2010 in Miami. I was attending my first Dale Carnegie International Convention and hardly knew anyone there. In the evenings there would be various parties to attend and on this particular occasion I had the honour of meeting Dale Carnegie’s daughter Donna Dale Carnegie and she introduced me to Mike.
Now Mike stood out in that crowd of Dale Carnegie people, because he had a long ponytail and was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. It turned out that Mike was the contractor who did all the stage audio sound etc., for the Convention and had been doing it for years.
“I always finish my year with the Dale Carnegie convention because you hold it in early December”, he told me. He also got me attention when he said, “I really like your organisation”. Being new to the Dale Carnegie world I was curious, so I asked him why he said that. He whispered to me in a conspiratorial fashion, “The things that people are saying out in front of stage and what they are doing behind the stage are the same”.
I asked what he meant by that. He continued, “Well I do a lot of these same types of events and we are all hooked up on the mics, so we can hear what is going on behind stage, as well as out on stage. There are plenty of folks who say one thing to the audience, but carry on quite the opposite off stage. I found in years of dealing with Dale Carnegie people they are genuine and they live the principles they espouse and I like that”.
In this example I have just modeled here, I am reproducing a conversation I had in Miami in 2010 and am using the point to say Dale Carnegie is great and the things we do are great, etc. This story is being used as evidence to get the listener to agree that Dale Carnegie is indeed great. I could say all of the same things and relate that story, just telling the details of what happened. However, when I include the dialogue, it brings the whole thing to life. People in the audience can picture a guy in a Hawaiian shirt, with a long ponytail, whispering this information to me. I can even cup my ear, as if I was listening to him, when he told me that secret part. They can hear his voice as I relate the story, which makes it more credible.
This requires a bit more work to do in the planning but not that much. After all, this is something that happened to you. It was an incident where you were told something by the main character in the story. All you have to do is tell what happened in their voice, rather than your own voice. If you do this you can take your storytelling to a much higher level. Let’s give it a go and add another string to our bow of storytelling expertise.