Notes on Deconstructing a Story Speech

This note is based on my reading of the book Connect Using Humor and Story_ How I Got 18 Laughs 3 Applauses in a 7 Minute Persuasive Speech by Ramakrishna, as well as other books and sources.

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1. The Story

Always try to identify the type of story presented in the speech.

7 classic types of storyline for adventures and heroes

from 一页纸创意思考术

• 回家 Returning home
  Back to the previous spot
  Related to family and carefree stage

• 得胜 Victory
  Pursuit excellency
  Defeat all enemies

• 复仇 Revenge
  Defeat and revenge on competitor
  Final victory
  Self-development through competing

• 屠龙 Dragonslayer
  Defeat impossible barricade and obstacle
  Defeat the environmental and non-human difficulties

• 重生 Reborn
  Changes and transformation
  Wait silence and change

• 寻爱 Journey for love
  Motivation based on love itself
  Help others to find love

• 登山 Climbing a mountain
  Spend long years on things and step by step to achieve the goal

4C in story design

• conflict
• character
• causality
• complication

2. The Roles in a story

• Protagonist
• Antoganist
• Supporting character

3. Structure a story

• A story should involve multiple conflicts
  In conflicts, solutions and related obstacles will be repeated again and again. Therefore they could be used to engage audiences.
• Showcase the final changes
  The final changes and decisive conflict will be the key to the story. Need to develop a believable explanation with the core message of the story.

4. Management of audiences' expectation and empathy

• Work along audiences' expectation and unexpectation to create humor lines
• Work with expectation: related to audiences and shorten the distances
• Work with unexpectation: create humor and engage audiences
• Create a list of what is expected and not expected of your audiences and then make use of them to create speech lines

5. Rhetoric devices in a speech

• Rule of the three: expected, expected, unexpected
• Presenting different perspectives: avoid preaching and bragging, figuring out the story with audiences
• Dialogue: no more than two rounds of dialogue, make it short. Use it to deliver the core message
• Visualize your speech: play around the five different senses
• Alliteration: the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words. To engage audiences and their expectation.
• Anaphora and epistrophe: same words at the beginning or the end to engage the audiences
• Simile and parallel
• Non-verbal expression instead of verbal description

6. Core Message

• Use the story and the final change to showcase the core message
• Avoid unfold the core message yourself, use dialogue or others
• Use metaphor in the speech and repeat it, appealing to audiences five senses to make it stick
• Catchphrase
• Structure here: story, core message, connection to audiences (application of the message )

7. Editing

• Keep the description and narrative short and keep every sentence count
• value the pause and silence to allow audiences to imagine

8. Equation for creating laugh lines

“Premise + Pause + Punch Line + Pause = Laughter”
e.g.
“People exaggerate that parents in India pressure their children to only become a doctor or an engineer. That’s not true. They don’t just pressure. They blackmail .”

Punch Line should create surprise by saying something contrary to the audience’s expectation.