Ep. 10. Ease up on the statistics

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When your speech unleashes a flood of statistics, you can lose your audience’s interest — and their emotional connection — fast. Let’s talk about how to chose a gem of a statistic and put it in the perfect setting… and then make it part of what drives your story, instead of dragging it off course.

Links: Nancy Duarte’s great book Resonate includes an account of her work with Al Gore on the speech that became the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. There’s so much more to the book than just that story — including a great tool for analyzing the narrative structure of a speech, case studies of powerful STAR (Something They’ll Always Remember) moments and much more. Please, go read it.

Music: “Upbeat” by Jon Luc Hefferman.

Photo: Mika Baumeister on Unsplash