193: Presenters Can Learn From Script Writers

<p>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.</p> <p> </p> <p>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.</p> <p> </p> <p>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.</p> <p> </p> <p>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. </p> <p> </p> <p>Now Mike stood out in that crowd of Dale Carnegie people, because he had a long ponytail and