Structuring your story

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Speaking to Inspire: Ceremonial and Motivational Speeches

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University of Washington

Speaking to Inspire: Ceremonial and Motivational Speeches

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Cours 4 sur 4 dans Specialization Dynamic Public Speaking

The most memorable speeches inspire, entertain, and praise. By blending stories and eloquence, great speeches highlight the core values motivating an audience. You might need to do this in a keynote address, a eulogy, or simply a business meeting. Inspiring audiences is a common, but difficult writing challenge. You want a speech that elevates the topic and the audience. This course gives you a method for preparing and delivering speeches that inspire and entertain. By the end of this course, you should be able to compose and deliver moving speeches that praise core audience values through evidence, storytelling, and humor. You should be able to write eloquent passages in tones appropriate to the audience and occasion and speak fluidly from either a well-prepared manuscript or from memory. Learners will record speeches, providing and receiving peer feedback.

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Week 1. Using values and storytelling to develop a great speech

Welcome! We begin this week with an overview of the course: What it is and what we’ll be doing. From there we can start preparing our speeches. We’ll start by finding the core values that will drive the speech. Values that speak to the topic and inspire your audience. We’ll then explore how to discuss those values through evidence and storytelling. By the end of the week, you’ll have a list of values and stories to write a speech. With a sense for the topic, we can then get to know each other with an introductory speech. It’s a fun and easy speech that allows you to get to know some of your classmates.

What is a story?5:04

How stories help your speech6:12

Structuring your story3:22

What's the point of the story?8:38

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Dr. Matt McGarrity
Principal Lecturer
UW Department of Communication

Since thinkers and writers have written on stories for millennia,

there's a pretty good storehouse of information.

Aristotle, good man,

Aristotle was interested in explaining In the structure of drama.

The German playwright, Gustav Freytag, developed his into a five act drama.

Robert McKee's Principles of Screen Writing,

is a voluminous exploration of good story structure for film.

Now, this isn't to say that one story telling formula works every single time.

If there was, all movies would be good.

I remember seeing Sylvester Stallone's Over The Top in the theaters,

that's a movie about arm wrestling.

It is terrible.

So I know there's no formula that works 100% of the time, but

there are useful conventions that can help you think through your basic plot.

Now, your plot is just a main sequence of events in your story.

Basically, that's what happened to whom and how did they deal with it.

Now, there are tons of ways to deal with story structure.

For speeches, delivered orally, I like a traditional narrative arc.

So exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax,

falling action, and resolution.

Think fables.

So we start out the story with the exposition.

Who's the character?

What's the setting?

Once upon a time there was a boy named Jack, he lived with his mother and

they were very poor.

So, then we have the inciting incident, that's what kicks the story off.

One day, Jack went to see the cow for money but he bought magic beans instead.

Jack, you jerk.

Now, we're on our way.

So now we have rising action.

We keep introducing plot elements to raise the stakes.

So the beanstalk grows.

Jack meets the giant's wife.

He steals some items without getting caught.

And then we get to the climax.

The conflict finally reaches its emotional peak.

This is where everything comes to a head.

Fee fi fo fum, the giant chases Jack, Jack chops down the bean stalk.

All right, then, after the climax,

we get the fallout from the decisions of that climax.

Here, we have the falling action.

So, here, the giant is killed, and then we end on the resolution, and

everyone lived happily ever after.

Except, of course, the giant.

And probably, if you think about it,

whoever lives next to what is now a giant rotting corpse.

I don't care what fantastic universe you live in,

it doesn't really effect the resale value on the house.

But, anyways, that's the basic story structure.

And there's a ton of different ways to run that structure.

We'll call these plots.

You've got your famous heroes journey, hero leaves home, confronts evil,

returns home changed.

That's Star Wars, Lord Of The Rings, Harry Potter.

You've got a typical tragedy structure.

The hero has a flaw or makes a mistake that undoes everything.

Okay, that's Macbeth, Madam Bovary, so on, so forth.

Understanding the structure will help us develop some powerful stories,

but in the telling of a story we start with context.

Once upon a time.

But with story writing, we start at the ending.

And once we know what the story's about, and

how we want to use it, then we can return to things like character in description.

So we map out a story, and then trim it up to make it a short anecdote if we need to.

But with this basic story structure framework in place, in the next video what

we're going to do, is start developing our stories by figuring out that ending first.

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