Developing the Best Anecdotes and Illustrations
Posted by NovaAngel at December 23rd, 2006
When running short on time, beginning speakers will generally cut the anecdotes and the illustrations from the speeches. Just give the audience facts, they tell themselves, the rest is fluff.
Not true.
Anecdotes and illustrations make ideas understandable and memorable. They give vague concepts specific interpretations. We don’t understand the “bad economic climate” until we know that means our relatives can’t sell their house in Dallas,… that the computer company won’t deliver the equipment unless we prepay the invoice,… or the tax base for our child’s school has declined by $40 million dollars.
Always prefer to cover two points with several illustrations rather than cover ten points with no illustrations. Anecdotes and illustrations breathe life into your sentiments.
The important question then is not whether to add or to omit illustrations, but which ones have the greatest impact. For the most part, the best are those that are brief, personal, and closely related to your specific audience and subject. Those that also appeal to the emotions are a bonus.
Brief: In general, the longer the story, the better the punch line or the emotional wallop must be.
Don’t confuse speechmaking with lovemaking. In lovemaking, the longer the romance and anticipation, the greater the satisfaction. Just the opposite is true in giving a speech. Anticipation of a point or punch line can build hostility in the listener. When an audience tunes into a story, they are making an investment of time in its outcome; the details along the way are rarely significant within themselves. When your listeners get to the end of the story, they must feel that it has been worth their investment of attention.
On the other hand, to convey the major idea of your speech, a long story may be far more memorable because of its length and perceived importance that bears its telling. I once told an eight-minute, blow-by-blow narration of a speaking tour across the country to illustrate one major point—poor customer service. I wanted the audience to feel the growing frustration of such a lengthy ordeal. But such a lengthy anecdote for one point is rare.
Length conveys importance of the idea. Don’t mislead your audience with a long story for a short point.
Personal: Search for the story or illustration that you can make your own. Of course, source books of biographical sketches, quotes, and maxims serve as excellent references for one-liners. And you can start your own anecdote file with clipped articles, stories, cartoons, and statistics as you read newspapers, magazines, and journals. One tip: File them by subjects you’re interested in as you go; illustrations not quickly retrievable are of little value to you.
If you choose a “canned” story or illustration, then personalize it. If you’re talking to accountants, the hero in the story becomes a number cruncher. The buffoon of your punch line becomes your Uncle Joe rather than “the farmer.” The department store may become a computer shop.
But there is no substitute for the personal experience story—your experience or that of a colleague or acquaintance, or your real Uncle Joe.
Don’t say that computers have increased rather than decreased the paper blizzard that floods our office. Instead, tell me how many documents your office generated in the process of correcting an incorrect billing on the Hooker account.
Don’t say that quality service should be the aim of everyone in your organization. Instead, tell me how a nobody, such as Joan Croy in your office, discovered a defective gadget in Customer Jones’s typewriter and repaired it on the spot during her lunch break when she was technically off the clock.
Illustrations—whether anecdotes or statistics—carry far more weight with audiences because they are woven of common people, common circumstances, and common feelings.
For example, a headline from the Scripps Howard News Service reads: “Taxes cost 163 minutes for every eight working hours.” That puts the “high cost of taxes” in perspective; we work almost three hours out of eight to pay them. Then the writer goes on to illustrate other facts: Food and tobacco cost 59 minutes; transportation, 40 minutes; medical care, 39 minutes; clothing, 24 minutes; recreation, 20 minutes; and all other expenses, 50 minutes.
Bombarding your listeners with numbers confuses them so that they recall none. To make those you select meaningful, bring them within the understanding of your audience. Make them personal.
Related to subject: In addition to being brief and personal, a statistic, anecdote, or other illustration must be closely related to your point. Most speakers violate the “illustrations must be related” rule when they are searching for humor. Yes, humor adds a light touch to an occasion and gives audiences a warm fuzzy feeling of a shared laugh. But humor for humor’s sake rarely works. Use humorous stories only if they relate to your point. And if you tell a long story, you’re getting more impact for the minutes if more than one detail of the illustration or anecdote makes a point.
In selecting related statistics as illustrations, use them with care. That means they should be up to date and relate to your audience’s current needs and circumstances. Nothing destroys credibility like having numbers that are ten years old.
Also, make sure your statistics aren’t misleading. If your competitor’s profit increased by 400 percent last year, that may mean that he sold four quilts rather than one. “Averages” are often deceptive. You can describe a hiker crossing a desert at 125 degrees and then plunging into a mountain stream at 41 degrees, and conclude that the temperature on his vacation averaged a pleasant 83 degrees.
Be wary of using too many statistics and round off the ones you select. Just remember that it’s easier to gather statistics and facts than to make them relevant and memorable. Don’t get sidetracked on the first and omit the second.
Emotional: Make them laugh or make them cry. Nothing makes you or your message more memorable than an emotional appeal. If fund raisers want contributions, stories about orphans and disease move people toward their pocketbooks. If sales managers want to get through a difficult customer’s door, they make their sales reps laugh until the task seems like challenging fun.
Humor helps in most any speech situation. Why? Because humor gives us a personal identification with the feelings of the audience. Humor makes you a human and approachable speaker—not robot-like. He laughs; therefore, he is.
You can add a humorous touch with a joke or one-liner. But, again, the funniest stories are usually your own personal experiences told with pizzazz you’ve practiced. The TV show Candid Camera and a similar show based on home-video shots have made millions off the fact that people love to laugh at ordinary people caught in funny, everyday circumstances.
Be concise, be personal, be relevant with your stories and statistics. For a bonus, add emotion.
