Narrative Presentations
415
When you’re describing an event or telling a story about a person, you’re giving a narrative presentation. For example, you might report on your campus’s annual Oktoberfest celebration to fulfill an oral presentation requirement for your history class. Or at a storytelling event you might share a story about childhood pranks you and your cousins played at family reunions. (See Table 16.3 for additional examples of narrative presentations.)
The best narrative presentations tell a good story that captures and holds listeners’ interest and attention. A chronological pattern of organization usually works best for this kind of speech because it enables you to lay out a sequence of events. For example, suppose you’re giving a speech about the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. To provide an account of this event, you’d want to use vivid language while describing the people, the experience of camping for four days with thousands of strangers, and the intensity of the musical performances. Here’s how your outline of main points might look:
Speech thesis: Convincing my friends to stay at the Bonnaroo festival paid off with an amazing surprise.
416
Main points:
Bonnaroo is one of the largest four-
day music festivals in the United States. After an exhausting day in the Tennessee heat, my friends were ready to go back to our campsite, but I convinced them to stay for the Earth Wind & Fire evening performance.
Imagine our surprise when the group invited Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper to join onstage to freestyle.
Thanks to the easygoing, collaborative spirit of the festival, we experienced an amazing set of funk and rap music.
Perhaps even more compelling than all of the Harry Potter novels is the story of J. K. Rowling’s rise from poverty to international success, with books for children as well as adults. Rowling’s narrative speeches inform her audiences about her personal struggles and can inspire them to believe in their abilities, regardless of how dismal their circumstances may seem.
You’ll also want to use language that draws your listeners into the sights, sounds, and emotions of the story (“heat,” “imagine,” “surprise”). The right nonverbal communication can further help you capture and hold your listeners’ attention. Just observe the nonverbal skills of good storytellers, like those found on the Moth (http:/