Often, one of the most powerful means of conveying a message and connecting with an audience is through a story, or narrative. Narratives tell tales, both real and imaginary, about practically anything under the sun. They can relate personal experiences, folk wisdom, parables, myths, and so forth.

Scholars of narratives have commented that all human history consists of stories. “Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories,” notes language scholar Mark Turner. “One story helps us make sense of another.”⁶ A growing body of neuroscientific evidence also suggests that it is through stories that we organize our thinking.⁷ The universal appeal of stories explains why speakers often use stories when addressing diverse audiences, particularly those whose members represent a variety of national cultures. Personal narratives (also called first-person narratives) are stories that we tell about ourselves. Third-person narratives are stories that we tell about others. Common to all narratives are the essential storytelling elements of plot, character, setting, and some sort of time line.

Stories can be relatively short and simple descriptions of short incidents worked into the body of the speech, or longer accounts that constitute most of the presentation and even serve as the organizing framework for it (see narrative pattern of organization, p. 189). In either case, a successful story will strike a chord and create an emotional connection between the speaker and audience members. For example, in a speech on helping more Americans earn postsecondary degrees, Melinda French Gates offered the following brief story to illustrate that although some community college students encounter many barriers to completing their degrees, they persevere:

Last year, we met a young man named Cornell at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina. We asked him to describe his typical day. He clocks into work at 11 P.M. When he gets off at 7 the next morning, he sleeps for an hour. In his car. Then he goes to class until 2 o’clock. “After that,” Cornell said, “I just crash.”⁸

Many speakers, whether they’re high-tech entrepreneurs rallying their teams or ministers at the Sunday morning pulpit, generously sprinkle their speeches with anecdotes—brief stories of meaningful and entertaining incidents based on real life, often the speaker’s own. Anecdotes can serve as a powerful tool to draw in an audience, commanding the audience’s attention and persuading or reinforcing their view of the speaker.⁹ The most important part of an anecdote is the moral—the lesson the speaker wishes to convey.¹⁰

How might you go about adding an anecdote into your speech? Communications professor Steven D. Cohen suggests visualizing the anecdote as a “moment” or

snapshot in time that invites listeners to experience a particular situation. . . . Speakers should describe only what they “see” in the still image of their mind . . . where and when the situation occurs, and then use details to help their listeners mentally ‘‘walk there.’’ By providing sufficient information about the context, speakers can transport their listeners to any moment in the past, present, or future.¹¹

In a speech about the need to preserve our national parks, Brock Evans, the director of the Endangered Species Coalition, does this artfully:

One of the leaders of the fight was a fifth-generation rancher, Carroll Noble. . . . [H]e had a spread over near Pinedale. I’ll never forget how he loved this Wyoming land, and how he expressed his feelings about it. One day, we were having dinner at his place. He had a big picture window there, framing that whole magnificent vista of the Wind River Range, its snowcapped jagged peaks, and the great tumbling mass of green forest spilling down its flank to the lake. At one point, he gestured out there, and turned to me with the greatest sadness: “You see that?” he said. “If they start cutting that, I’ll never look out that window again.”¹²