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examples of narrative speech topics

Examples of narrative speech topics

125 strong ideas for effective personal storytelling speeches

By: Susan Dugdale | Last modified: 12-01-2022

Narrative speech topics are topics especially designed to trigger telling a story.

And who doesn’t love being told a good story? They’re universally appreciated. It’s the oldest, most effective way of emphasizing a point, illustrating an idea or recounting an event.

For as long as there have been people in the world, there have been people telling them stories: story tellers.

What's on this page:

125 examples of narrative speech topics: - 40 'first' experiences , - 40 tell-a-story topics , - 35 personal story ideas
How to best use this page

Choosing the right narrative speech topic

How to get from topic to speech (with a printable speech outline to download)

A definition of the word 'narrative'

A personal story is a powerful story, the difference between an anecdote and a story.

Additional resources for storytelling speeches

Chalk board with writing in white chalk: What's your story? 125 narrative speech topics.

How to make best use of this page

Browse the topics and make a shortlist of any that appeal to you. (These are the ones that will immediately have you thinking of stories you could share.)

Make sure you download the printable narrative speech outline. Then take what you need from the other information. (If you've never given a narrative or storytelling speech before, read all of it!) It's here to help you put together the best speech you possibly can. ☺

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The most powerful stories to tell are personal. They’re the game changers, the significant events: meetings, accidents, cultural jolts, and life lessons that have made an impact.

They’re stories about family, our children, love, marriage, politics, education, work, living in society, philosophy, the natural world, ...

In telling these stories we reveal aspects of ourselves: sharing our innermost thoughts and feelings.

To give a good narrative speech, one that fully engages our audience we need to:

choose a meaningful story with strong characters they can relate to in a situation they’ll recognize and identify with
use vivid language enabling them to easily picture and feel what’s happening

A spoken or written account of connected events; a story: "a gripping narrative"

Word with similar meanings: account, story, tale, chronicle, history, description, record.

(Definition from Oxford Languages )

Because narrative speeches are often stories about ourselves we need to think carefully about what we share and with whom.

Some subjects are sensitive for many reasons. And what could be completely appropriate in one setting could be quite wrong in another.

As the giver of the speech, you’ll want to be clear about what you’re sharing and why.

Additionally, an emotional narrative speech exposing your own deeply felt and unresolved issues would be difficult for an audience to witness.

They’d want to help, send you to a therapist, leave... People do not want to feel embarrassed or uncomfortable on your behalf.

The right narrative topic idea is one you know your audience will want to hear, fits the speech purpose you’ve been given, and one you feel comfortable sharing.

Should you decide to use someone else's story for your speech be sure to acknowledge whose it is and where you got it from.

Getting from topic to speech

Once you’ve decided on your topic, the next step is developing a story outline. That involves carefully thinking through the sequence of the story, or what you’re going put in it, scene by scene and why, from beginning to end.

To help you do that easily I've put together a printable narrative speech outline. To download it click on the image below. (The pdf will open in a new window.)

Chalkboard with text: download printable narrative speech outline

The outline will guide you through each of the steps you need to complete. (Instructions are included.)

Rehearsal, rehearsal, rehearsal

Once your outline is done, your next task is rehearsing, and then rehearsing some more. You’ll want to know before you give the speech that it:

makes sense and can be followed easily,
grabs and holds the audience’s attention, is relevant to them,
and easily fits the time you’ve been given.

Rehearsal lets you find out in a safe way where any glitches might be lurking and gives you an opportunity to fix them.

It also gives you time to really work at refining how you tell the story.

For instance, what happens if this part is said softly and slowly? Or if this bit is delivered more quickly, and that has a long pause after it?

And what about your body language? Are you conscious of what you’re actually doing as you speak? Do you ‘show’ with your body and how you use your voice, as well as ‘tell’ with your words?

The way you tell a story makes an enormous difference to how it is received. A good story can be ruined by poor delivery. If you make the time to practice, that’s largely avoidable.

For more on how to rehearse – a step by step guide to rehearsing well
For more on the vocal aspects of speech delivery
For more on developing effective body language

Many people share an anecdote thinking they’re telling a story. They’re not. Although they have similarities, they are different.

Drawing of a girl wearing a red dress. Text: Anecdote v story: the difference. Last night in the bar there was a girl wearing a red dress.

An anecdote is a series of facts, a brief account of something that happened. It is delivered without interpretation or reflection. It’s a snapshot cut from a continuum: a slice of life. We’ve taken notice because it was interesting, strange, sad, amusing, attractive, eccentric...to us. It captured our attention in some way.

For example:

"Last night there was a gorgeous girl in the bar wearing a red dress. She ordered a brandy. After she finished her drink, she left."

In contrast, a story develops. It travels from its starting place, goes somewhere else where something happens, and finally arrives at a destination. A story has a beginning, a middle and an end. It moves. Things change.

Here’s the same anecdote example reworked as a very brief story. The person telling it is reminiscing, talking about the past to girl called Amy.

"Last night there was a girl in the bar wearing a red dress—so young, so gorgeous, so full of life. Seeing her whirled me back to us. You and me and that song. Our song: Lady in Red. “The lady in red is dancing with me, cheek to cheek. There's nobody here, it's just you and me. It's where I want to be.”

The complete and abrupt shift from present to past overwhelmed me. Thoughts, feelings, memories... At twenty-five and twenty-six we knew it all and had it all.

When I looked up, she’d finished her drink and gone. Oh, Amy! What did we do?"

Narrative speech topic ideas: 40 firsts

Often the first time we experience something creates deep lasting memories. These can be both very good and very bad which makes them an excellent foundation for a gripping speech.

We love listening to other people’s dramas, especially when they’ve gone through something significant and come out the other side strengthened – armed with new knowledge.

Child with a thermometer in her mouth tucked up in a hospital bed.

The first time I stood up for myself.
The first time I drove a car.
The first time I rode a bike.
The first time I fell in love.
The first time I felt truly frightened.
The first time I realised my family was different.
The first time I understood I was different from other kids.
My first day at a new school.
The first time I felt truly proud of myself.
My first date.
My first job interview.
The first time I realised no matter how hard I tried I was never going to please, or be liked, by everybody.
How I got my first paid job.
What I did with my first pay.
My first pet.
My first real fight- what it was about, and what I learned from it.
The first time I tried hard to achieve something and failed.
The first time I realised some people are not to be trusted.
The first time I was away from home on my own.
The first time I had to ask a stranger for help.
The first time I experienced what it’s like to have someone close be either seriously ill or die
The first time I was ill and was taken to hospital.
The first time I felt utterly filled with happiness.
The first time I was sincerely impressed and influenced by another person’s goodness.
My first pin up hero.
My childhood home – what I remember – the feelings and events I associate with it.
The first time I realised the color of my skin, or the shape of my body, or my face, or my gender, or anything else about me, made a difference.
The first time I tried to communicate with someone who did not speak my language.
The first time I saw snow, the sea, climbed a mountain, camped out under the stars, walked a wilderness trail, caught a wave...
The first time I visited another country where the language, customs and beliefs were vastly different to my own.
The first time I understood and experienced the power of kindness.
The first time I told a lie.
The first time I understood how fortunate I was to be me.
The first time I realised my goals and aspirations were attainable.
The first time I realised having enough money to do whatever I wanted could not buy happiness.
The first time I realised that some people were always going to be better at some things that I was.
The first TV show/film/book I loved and why.
The first time I really understood I was prejudiced.
The first time someone stepped up for me – what that felt like, and what it changed.
How first impressions of people and/or an event are not always right.

40 tell-a-story speech topics

Here's another 40 narrative speech suggestions. Give yourself time as go through them to consider suitability of the stories they trigger. Would what you're thinking of suit your audience? Does it fit your overall speech purpose?

Watercolor painting of a tree covered with US monetary notes.

How I learned to stand up for my own beliefs.
How my name influenced who I am.
My favorite teacher – why, what did they do? How did that make you feel?
When and how I learned being adult does not mean being grown up.
Why winning is important to me.
What terrified me as a child.
How I learned to manage my anger.
What people regularly assume about me and how that makes me feel.
How having an animal to love made me a better human being.
How humor defuses tension.
What it feels like to rebel against authority, and why I do it.
My learning break through.
How I discovered what meant the most to me.
How I learned my family was poor, rich, odd, ...
When I fully realized the importance and power of community.
What I learned through living through my parent’s divorce.
My experience of being an outsider.
My favorite way to unwind.
A decision I made that I now regret and why.
How goal setting has helped me achieve.
My safe place.
What being unfairly punished taught me about myself.
Rituals that serve me well. For example, always cleaning my teeth a particular way, always sorting my clothes out for the following day before I go to bed, always making Christmas presents for my family, ...
What money means to me and why.
How being a parent fundamentally changed me,
What being the underdog taught me.
Why I chose my own path, and not the one my parents wanted for me,
Why family celebrations are important to me.
Why I adopted a child.
What religion means to me.
What marriage, friendship,... means to me.
What needing to be helped has taught me.
Why and how I support giving back to the community.
Tricks I use to get myself to do things I know I should do but don’t really want to.
What I do to manage fear or anxiety of public speaking.
How I learned to stop biting my finger nails or stop some other behaviour driven by nervous anxiety.
How I learned to stop feeling like my job in life was to make my parents or anybody else feel happy.
What having a job as a young person taught me.
The complications of being the favorite child in your family.
The difficulties of having to choose between friends.

35 more narrative or personal story speech topics

Illustration of man walking a tightrope over a ravine.

The time I made an assumption about a situation or a person and got it entirely wrong.
What being totally and suddenly out of my depth in a situation felt like and the consequences.
A lesson I learned the hard way that helped me become a better person. For example: over spending, driving too fast, drinking too much, being caught out in a lie...
Important things I learned through keeping old people company.
What I learned through losing a good friend
What coming face to face with my own mortality taught me.
How the language of kindness transcends language and cultural differences.
What being ashamed of my own behaviour taught me.
How I unknowingly broke local cultural customs while overseas and what happened
How taking revenge for a wrong did not right it.
The silliest unnecessary risk I’ve taken.
How first impressions are not always right.
How pretending to be strong (fake it until you make it) can work very well.
What I really wanted my parents to do for me and they didn’t.
How our clothing influences how other people perceive us.
My earliest memories: what they were, how they made me feel.
Why I became disillusioned about politics.
Why I decided to go into politics.
The influence of music on my life.
A personal phobia and how it impacts on my life: fear of spiders, fear of the dark, fear of thunder...
The impact of peer pressure on decision making.
What I’ve learned about gratitude.
How I lied in order to cover for a friend and what happened.
My most embarrassing moment and how I survived it.
The worst day of my life: what it taught me.
How I know peer pressure can make us behave in ways we don’t really want to.
How I learned to read people.
Why saying thank you is important.
Random acts of kindness and generosity.
Being lost in a strange city.
What I learned through genuinely apologizing for something I did.
How the way a person speaks influences what we think about them.
How a mentor changed my life.
The most thrilling exciting thing I’ve done.
How being a leader and being looked up to felt.

Other resources for narrative speeches

Pages on this site:

60 vocal variety and body language speech topics - speech ideas to encourage excellent storytelling
Storytelling setups: what works & why - How to open or lead into a story
How to effectively use a small story as part of a speech
Tips and exercises for working with and improving body language
Simple characterization techniques for compelling storytelling
9 aspects of vocal delivery - explanations, tips and exercises to improve your voice
How to rehearse well - step by step guidance

Offsite storytelling speech resources

5 creative storytelling projects recommended by teachers, for everyone | (ted.com)

Toastmasters Project | Connect with storytelling – Level Three

Connect with Storytelling – District One (district1toastmasters.org)
8300-Connect-with-Storytelling.pdf (toastmasters-lightning.org)

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Resource 9: Storytelling Speech Template

Storytelling speech template.

The most effective and enjoyable story to tell are the ones that come from the heart. Instead of concentrating on the fact that you have to tell a story, start from a place of excitement and care: What are you really excited to share with people? What moments are special to you? What memories bring strong emotions for you, whether they be motivation, pride, shame, longing, or even regret? Don’t get in your own way by thinking about how a particular memory might be too small, too insignificant, or too boring. Instead, remember stories should be a reflection of you, not what you think others want to hear.

The following template can be used in more formal storytelling situations, where you are telling a story uninterrupted for an audience, often as a portion of a speech. As with any template, you might not need this tool; in fact, if it interferes with you being authentic, please disregard! That said, if it helps you get unstuck or get the ideas flowing, use this template to organize your ideas. Note: the sections in this template can also be placed in any order, depending on what makes sense for your speech. For additional help, watch the video example of 16-year old Matteo giving a speech on arts education.

“Personal-Universal-Application” Format

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How to tell powerful stories in your speeches.

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Why tell stories in speeches? Because they are interesting, they help people remember what you say, and they are a good way to convey information and emotion memorably.

Mark Turner , a writer and philosopher who has been associated with the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Center for Neural and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Maryland, goes even further. In his landmark book, The Literary Mind , published by Oxford in 1996, he says, “Story is a basic principle of mind.” In other words, he argues that we think in terms of stories. We learn from the high chair that if we push a glass of milk over, white liquid spills on the floor, a parent comes running making noises, mops it up, and kisses us on the top of the head (if we’re lucky). That’s a story, and it’s a basic understanding of cause and effect by which we make sense of our world.

There are actors, actions, objects, and results. It’s all good fun, it’s memorable, and it’s how we continue to think long after we’ve left the high chair.

How does that apply to public speaking? Most people organize their talks in lists of information. (Five reasons to join our exciting investment program.) Unfortunately, the human mind is not constructed to remember lists very well. Once you’ve told me 3 or 4 things, to remember the 4th or 5th I’ll have to forget the first. ‘In one ear and out the other’ pretty describes how we respond to lists. Yet everyone who has heard, seen, or read it once remembers the story of Romeo and Juliet.

So if you give speeches more like Shakespeare and less like the phone book, you’ll be much more memorable. That’s why stories are important.

How do you create a great story for the purposes of public speaking?

My favorite structure for a persuasive speech is the problem-solution structure.

You begin by describing a problem that the audience has, and then you describe a solution. You can either hold to that structure, and tell stories at various points along the way, as examples and supporting evidence and so on, or you can treat the whole speech as a story.

Think of your stories as having three acts.

The first act presents an idea or a situation that will engage the audience (Romeo meets Juliet and falls in love). It’s best if this idea or situation is one that, once it has happened or been told, cannot be undone. (Romeo cannot ‘unmeet’ Juliet.) If you give your audience some information at the beginning of your speech that they don’t know, it has the same effect. (Our customer base has been eroding for the last 16 quarters, and just today I learned that it’s official — we’re now down for 17 quarters. We can’t afford to go on like this…).

Needless to say, it should be information that is of interest to the audience — it should be about a problem they have.

The second act raises the stakes on the earlier idea or situation. (Romeo marries Juliet despite the feud between the two families.) Once again, it should be something that cannot easily be undone. (If we have another down quarter, we’re going to have to close manufacturing plants in Chicago and Ohio.)

The third act precipitates a resolution, either favorable or unfavorable, by posing a question that must be resolved. (Romeo kills Tybalt in a duel, thus resulting in his banishment. Will Romeo and Juliet live happily ever after? Answer: no.) (To turn things around, I’m starting a new product line, code name Lemmings, that will excite customers once again and bring them flocking back to our stores.) Just as no one in the play Romeo and Juliet ever literally asks the resolving question out loud, you don’t have to in your speech. You do have to resolve it, and the best way is to get your audience to undertake some action to enlist them in your persuasive moment. (I’ve put prototype Lemmings underneath your chairs. I’d like you now to please take them out of their boxes and try them out.)

Just as the rest of Romeo and Juliet fills in around these key moments with scenes that explore the consequences of these interesting, fateful actions, your speech should too.

That’s the basic structure of a good story. But there’s more.

Western society contains a few basic stories that everyone knows and resonates to, so if you can invoke one of those stories, you’ll get instant buy-in from your audience.

For example, if you ask your employees to embark with you on a long and arduous journey to develop a new product, they’ll complain about the obstacles along the way, unless you invoke a Quest story. Then, the obstacles are to be expected because that’s what happens on a quest. The heroes (your audience) meet obstacles and suffer reversals — but eventually overcome them all to reach the goal. Don’t make the mistake of casting yourself as the lone hero — always bring the audience along with you.

The Quest story is the most basic one, and audiences get the idea very quickly because the story is so deeply ingrained in our psyches. Quest stories have heroes, journeys, obstacles, mentors, and most importantly a goal at the end. For more information on the subject, read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces the definitive book on the subject.

After the Quest, the other fundamental stories are: Stranger in a Strange Land , Love Story , Rags to Riches , and Revenge .

The way to think about these stories is as thematic ideas that you invoke as you go through your speech. You might do it with a specific reference to a particular, well-known Quest story, like the Holy Grail, the Wizard of Oz, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, or you might use the elements and the language of a Stranger in a Strange Land story in order to bring the audience into that magical space without actually telling them bluntly that ‘you’re on a quest’. It’s better in this case not to be blunt, but rather to evoke the stories with their unconscious power to orient us and bring us into a space where we see the outcome as ordained by the structure of the story.

Once you’ve picked your thematic story and you’re off on a Quest or you’re all Strangers in a Strange Land, then you want to think about using archetypes to get further storytelling mileage out of our common mythology.

Basically, an archetype is a model of a character, or part of a character. The word and concept have been around for a long time, but they were made famous, so to speak, by the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.

When Jung talked about archetypes, he meant primarily aspects of a person — the Self, the Shadow (your Dark Side) and the Persona (the face you put toward the world). But he also talked about a host of other kinds of people, and aspects of people and the natural world, that could be archetypes, from the child, hero, mother and wise old man to the fish.

The idea is that your particular mother resonates for you with the archetypal mother in some ways, and not in other ways. You may develop a mother complex as a result. We live at our best and most fully when we’re in harmony with all the archetypes we summon up.

Jung believed that archetypes were real — a kind of bridge between our inner psychological world and the real world out there. More than that, we all have access to universal wisdom and understanding through and with these archetypes.

OK, so what does that mean for speakers?

I think we can invoke the power of the basic archetypes by naming them at appropriate moments in our stories and by using them as ways to connect with the audience. Words like ‘child’, ‘mother’, ‘father’ and so on have enormous resonance for just about everyone in your audience. The trick is to let your audience do the work, creating the associations, by giving them enough detail to get their minds working, but not so much that you stop them from using their imaginations.

Archetypes work best in simple stories that allow audiences to fill in the blanks. You need to craft these stories — really parables — with great care so that they are not hackneyed or silly.

If you do it right, you can create powerful, memorable stories — on a variety of levels — in your speeches that call us all to our best, archetypal selves and move your audiences to action.

For a great example of successful storytelling in a speech, watch Malcolm Gladwell’s TED.com talk on Howard Moskowitz, spaghetti sauce, and the platonic dish. Gladwell’s story artfully weaves together the food industry’s quest for understanding human food-eating behavior with a three-act drama about Howard Moskowitz’s search for the perfect spaghetti sauce. The result of the search will surprise you; in part because Gladwell has constructed the story so well, and in part because you may think you know what you want in a spaghetti sauce, but you really don’t.

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About the author: nick morgan.

How Long Do You Have to Prepare a Presentation?

[…] Depois de todas as dicas anteriores, é importante compilar tudo e criar uma ligação. A apresentação tem que ter um fio condutor, do princípio ao fim. Uma excelente maneira é contar uma história, criando personagens, por exemplo. Deves ser criativo e dar asas à tua imaginação. Sobre este ponto podes ler mais aqui. […]

[…] to our thinking: Stranger in a Strange Land, Revenge, Rags to Riches, and Love Story. You can look elsewhere in the archives for explanations of the stories and what they […]

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Structure Your Presentation Like a Story

Nancy Duarte

To win people over, create tension between the status quo and a better way.

After studying hundreds of speeches, I’ve found that the most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved.

ND Nancy Duarte is a best-selling author with thirty years of CEO-ing under her belt. She’s driven her firm, Duarte, Inc., to be the global leader behind some of the most influential messages and visuals in business and culture. Duarte, Inc., is the largest design firm in Silicon Valley, as well as one of the top woman-owned businesses in the area. Nancy has written six best-selling books, four have won awards, and her new book, DataStory: Explain Data and Inspire Action Through Story , is available now. Follow Duarte on Twitter: @nancyduarte or LinkedIn .

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17 Storytelling Ideas to Breathe Life Into Every Speech
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With a few audience members after sharing stories in Australia

You saw the title so let’s jump right in with 17 storytelling ideas that will breathe life into your speeches and keep your audiences engaged.

Idea Number One: Start your stories in different places. You don’t have to start a story at the beginning. You can start it in the middle or even at the end. For example, I could start a story like this:

“There I was, standing on stage with the 1 st place trophy at the 1999 World Championship of Public Speaking. Life as a speaker was great! However, it didn’t start out that way. In fact, back in 1995…”

You can give the end and then work your way back to how you got there. Mix it up with each story. Don’t start them all in the same place.

Idea Number Two: Keep your audience curious from the beginning. What questions can you plant in the minds of your audience members that they’ll want answered during the story? For example, I start off one of my stories with, “You might not have realized this but…I’m black. Hold on, let me tell you how I found this out!” Along with uncovering some humor, this line makes my audience curious as to what happened and, therefore, they’re happy to come on the journey with me.

Idea Number 3 : Get to your stories quicker. There’s way too much set-up (what I call “pre-ramble”) for many of the stories I see. Get to the story quickly and then go rapidly into the conflict.

Idea Number 4: Take your time between your lines. That’s where the story lives…in the space between the lines. Don’t rush to get to your next line. Instead, find ways to milk the line you just gave. In several of my stories, the majority of the laughs come from the looks rather than the lines. However, you have to give yourself space for that.

Idea Number 5: Condense to connect. When you give a scene with two (or more) characters talking in dialogue, don’t tell us everything, just tell us something . Try not to go back and forth between characters with lines of dialogue more than 2-3 times. Otherwise, your audience will quickly grow tired. Instead, put all of the important statements in no more than a couple of lines of dialogue.

Idea Number 6: Use character dialogue (with a quick narration set-up) in order to shorten your stories and pump life into them. There’s far too much narration in many stories. Dialogue will shorten your stories.

Idea Number 7: Don’t just establish a conflict, escalate it.

Idea Number 8: Don’t be the Guru of your own story. Let us know who or what gave you the cure that changed your life for the better. You can be the hero (the person who overcame his conflict) but don’t be the Guru (the person who showed you how).

Idea Number 9: Show the emotional change in your character AFTER you overcome OR transcend your conflict. No change, no story.

Idea Number 10: Realize it’s the looks you give before, during, and/or after the lines that really tell the story. Or as my friend, Darren LaCroix, says, “Reactions tell the story.”

Idea Number 11: Make sure you have a Foundational Phrase that your audience can easily remember and repeat. It should be rhythmic, you-focused (meaning audience-focused), and preferably fewer than 10 words. For example, one of my foundational phrases is, “Don’t get ready, stay ready.” My audiences can use that phrase as a guide moving forward.

Idea Number 12: When delivering the lines of your characters, use their posture, positioning, and a “slight” change in your voice (whether it’s pace, pitch, volume, etc.) to make that person come alive and be different from the other characters. For example, you might have a character that is stern and so he has a very stiff posture and possibly crosses his arms and frowns when he talks.

Idea Number 13: Be subtle with everything you do delivery-wise. For example, you don’t need to speak with a child’s voice when delivering the lines of a child. Instead, speak with your voice (with maybe a little higher pitch) but deliver it with the child’s expression. He or she can also look up to show that the child is talking to an adult.

Idea Number 14: Come out of your story to talk to the audience. Remember, you are NOT doing a stage-play. You’re supposed to be having a conversation with your audience. When you get into a story, you don’t have to lose that conversation. Instead, mix the story with the conversation. For example, I have a story that goes like this:

“You should have been with my wife and me 11 years ago as we took our 6 month-old daughter, Tori, to the doctors. Raise your hand if you have kids? Great, then YOU know the doctor is going to measure her length and her weight…” Even though I already started my story, I looked to find ways to keep bringing my audience members into it. I call these “You-focused check-ins.” They keep the audience on their toes because, instead of being passive spectators, they become active participants.

Idea Number 15: When your story is over and you’ve given your Foundational Phrase, you don’t need to ramble on about the point. First of all, the story actually makes the point. The Foundational Phrase makes the point memorable. If you keep talking and trying to drive the point home, your audience will want the ride to end.

Idea Number 16: Invite your audience members into your scene. For example, I might say, ”Imagine being in my passenger’s seat as I went through the KFC drive-thru.” My audience members are now in my passenger’s seat for that story.

Idea Number 17: With a few exceptions, keep your stories short. The longer you work on a story, the shorter it should get. I try to keep most of mine under 4 minutes.

There you have it…17 storytelling ideas that will breathe life into every speech.

What are some ideas you have that have helped with your stories?

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Sahul Hameed

Storytelling

Storytelling has been an integral part of human communication since time immemorial.

From cave paintings to epic poems, stories have shaped cultures, preserved history, and captured the imagination.

In today's fast-paced world, the art of storytelling is not limited to folklore or literature. It is a potent tool for effective communication, especially in speeches. In this blog post, we will delve into the significance of storytelling in speeches, how it captivates audiences, and enhances a speaker's credibility.

Understanding the importance of storytelling in speeches ‍

Why storytelling matters.

Storytelling transcends mere words. It taps into the core of human psychology, resonating with emotions and experiences. In a speech, storytelling can turn a dry topic into a captivating narrative, making it relatable and memorable for the audience.

Here are some specific statistics to understand why storytelling matters:

90% of people remember a message better if it is told in the form of a story.
65% of people make buying decisions based on emotion, not logic. Stories can help to tap into those emotions and make your audience more likely to take action.
75% of people are more likely to trust a company that tells stories.

How it engages the audience?

The power of storytelling lies in its ability to captivate an audience's attention. Stories create a connection by drawing the listener into the narrative. They evoke empathy, curiosity, and a sense of shared experience.

The impact on the speaker's credibility

When a speaker weaves compelling stories into their speech, it enhances their credibility. It demonstrates a mastery of the subject matter and an understanding of the audience's needs. Moreover, storytelling reveals authenticity and vulnerability, making the speaker more relatable.

The art of crafting a compelling narrative

To master the art of storytelling in speeches, it's crucial to understand the elements that make a narrative great.

Compelling stories revolve around well-developed characters. In a speech, characters can be real people, historical figures, or even abstract concepts. The key is to make them relatable and relevant to the audience.

A well-structured plot is the backbone of any narrative. It consists of an introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. In a speech, the plot helps guide the audience through the message.

Conflict is the driving force behind a story's tension and intrigue. It can be a problem to solve, a challenge to overcome, or a moral dilemma. In a speech, the conflict keeps the audience engaged, wondering how it will be resolved.

The resolution brings closure to the story, providing answers or insights. In a speech, it should tie back to the main message and leave a lasting impression on the audience.

Examples of well-crafted narratives

Well-crafted narratives are powerful tools that can captivate an audience and make a speech or presentation memorable. One example is Steve Jobs' commencement address at Stanford University in 2005. With a simple structure and engaging storytelling, Jobs shared personal anecdotes about his life, including dropping out of college and being diagnosed with cancer. Through these stories, he conveyed lessons and insights that resonated with the graduates, inspiring them to pursue their passions fearlessly.

Another example of a well-crafted narrative is Malala Yousafzai's speech to the United Nations in 2013 . Yousafzai shared her own harrowing experiences growing up in Pakistan under the Taliban regime and surviving an assassination attempt because of her advocacy for girls' education. Her eloquent storytelling highlighted the importance of education for all children, particularly girls, and motivated world leaders to take action in promoting education as a fundamental right.

These examples demonstrate how well-crafted narratives can make speeches more engaging by connecting emotionally with the audience.

Finding your storytelling voice

Imagine sitting in a dimly lit room, surrounded by eager faces, their eyes fixated on you. The air is thick with anticipation as you take a deep breath and begin to speak. In that moment, you hold the power to captivate your audience, to transport them to another world through the art of storytelling. Stories have been an integral part of human culture for centuries, serving as a means of communication, entertainment, and education. And when it comes to speeches, the ability to weave a compelling narrative can be the difference between an forgettable lecture and an engaging, influential experience that lingers in the minds of listeners long after your final words fade away. Welcome to the world of storytelling in speeches – where words become magic and ideas come alive.

Discovering your authentic voice: embracing vulnerability, being relatable, incorporating personal anecdotes

In the world of public speaking, finding and embracing your authentic voice is essential to captivating an audience. While it can be tempting to put on a persona or follow a formulaic script, true connection with listeners comes from vulnerability and relatability. By sharing personal anecdotes that highlight your own experiences, you invite others into your world and create an emotional bond. From triumphs to failures, these stories serve as powerful tools for engaging an audience and bringing your message to life.

When incorporating personal anecdotes into a speech, it's important to find the right balance between authenticity and relevance. Choose stories that not only demonstrate vulnerability but also directly relate to the topic at hand. Sharing moments of struggle or doubt can make you more relatable, while success stories can inspire and motivate. The key is to select anecdotes that provide insights or lessons learned that will resonate with your audience. By focusing on both vulnerability and relevance in storytelling, you create a powerful connection with your listeners that leaves a lasting impression.

Incorporating personal anecdotes also helps establish trust with your audience. When we tell our own stories, we show our genuine selves - complete with flaws and imperfections. This transparency allows listeners to see us as relatable human beings rather than distant speakers on a stage. Sharing personal experiences creates an atmosphere of openness where audiences feel comfortable embracing their own vulnerabilities and connecting emotionally with the speaker's message.

Exercises to develop your storytelling skills

One of the most effective ways to develop your storytelling skills is through regular practice and exercises. Here are a few exercises that can help you improve your ability to tell engaging and memorable stories:

1. Start by telling personal anecdotes: Take a moment each day to recall a memorable experience from your own life and practice telling it as a story. Pay attention to the details, emotions, and imagery in order to make the story come alive for your audience.

2. Add variety with fictional stories: In addition to personal anecdotes, try inventing fictional stories as an exercise. This allows you to stretch your creativity and explore different themes, characters, and settings. Experiment with different genres such as fantasy, sci-fi, or mystery to expand your storytelling repertoire.

3. Refine by editing: After telling a story, make it a habit to review and edit it. Look for opportunities to enhance certain aspects of the narrative like pacing, character development or setting description. By constantly refining and honing your stories through this editing process, you'll gradually improve their impact on listeners.

Structuring your speech: from beginning to end

When it comes to delivering a captivating speech, the structure is of utmost importance. Just like a well-constructed building needs a strong foundation, your speech requires proper organization from beginning to end.

The opening act:

The opening act of your speech is crucial as it sets the tone and captures the audience's attention right from the start. You want to create a strong first impression that leaves your listeners intrigued and eager to hear more.

One effective way to begin is by using a captivating hook or an attention-grabbing anecdote. This could be a personal story, an interesting fact, or even a thought-provoking question that relates to your topic.

Setting the stage:

After you've hooked your audience, it's important to set the stage for your speech. This involves providing some background information or context that will help your listeners understand the topic at hand. You can do this by briefly explaining key terms or concepts related to your subject matter.

Additionally, you may want to share relevant statistics, research findings, or historical events that support the importance or relevance of your topic. By doing so, you establish credibility and demonstrate that you have done thorough research on the subject.

The climax:

The climax of your speech is the peak of excitement or intensity. It is the moment where you deliver your most important message or make a compelling argument that grabs the attention and emotions of your audience. This is the point where you have built up anticipation and interest through engaging storytelling, persuasive evidence, or powerful anecdotes.

To create a climactic moment in your speech, consider using rhetorical devices such as repetition, parallelism, or contrast to emphasize your main points.

A well-structured speech not only makes it easier for both you as a speaker and for your audience to follow along but also enhances their overall listening experience. By carefully considering how each section flows into another and ensuring that there is cohesion throughout, you can create an impactful presentation that leaves a lasting impression on everyone who hears it.

Quick takeaways:

Choose a story that is relevant to your audience and that will resonate with them.
Make sure your story is well-told and engaging.
Use vivid language and imagery to bring your story to life.
Connect your story to your message in a clear and concise way.
Practice your story so that you can deliver it confidently.

The power of visuals and multimedia: Storytelling in speeches via presentations

In today's digital age, where attention spans are decreasing and information overload is the norm, captivating visuals and multimedia elements have become essential tools for effective storytelling in speeches. The power of visuals lies in their ability to create a lasting impact on the audience by appealing to their visual senses and evoking emotions. When used strategically, well-designed slides can enhance the speaker's message and make it more memorable.

Multimedia elements such as videos, images, or audio clips add another layer of engagement and make speeches more dynamic. For example, incorporating a relevant video clip can provide real-life examples that support the speaker's message and resonate with the audience on a personal level. Additionally, using compelling images can help paint vivid mental pictures in the minds of listeners, making them feel connected to the story being told.

Furthermore, visuals and multimedia play a crucial role in keeping audiences engaged throughout a speech. Humans are inherently visual creatures who process visual information much faster than text alone. By supplementing text-heavy slides with eye-catching graphics or animations, speakers can break up monotony and maintain interest among listeners. In turn, this engagement facilitates better retention of information conveyed during the speech.

Tips for using multimedia effectively

One key tip for using multimedia in speeches is to keep it simple and relevant . Avoid using too many visuals or videos that may divert attention from your main message. Instead, select high-quality images or short clips that directly support and reinforce the points you are making.

Another important consideration is the timing of when you introduce multimedia elements into your speech. Rather than starting with a visual presentation right away, begin by connecting with your audience through engaging storytelling and compelling language. Once you have established a strong connection and captured their attention, strategically incorporate multimedia as an additional layer of reinforcement for your ideas. This approach creates a seamless flow and ensures that the visuals serve as enhancements rather than distractions in the overall storytelling process.

Connecting with your audience

Connecting with your audience is crucial in any form of communication, but it becomes even more important when delivering a speech. One effective way to connect with your audience is by sharing personal experiences or anecdotes that they can relate to. By telling stories that are relevant and meaningful, you create an emotional connection that captures their attention and resonates with them on a deeper level.

Another powerful method of connecting with your audience is through the use of humor. Laughter has the ability to break down barriers and establish a sense of camaraderie between the speaker and the listeners. Incorporating well-timed jokes or light-hearted anecdotes can instantly grab their attention, make them feel at ease, and create a positive atmosphere throughout the speech. However, it's important to ensure that any humor used is appropriate for the occasion and doesn't alienate any portion of the audience.

Connecting with your audience goes beyond just speaking their language or relating to their experiences; it also involves actively listening to them. Paying attention to non-verbal cues such as facial expressions and body language allows you to gauge their interest levels, adapt your delivery accordingly, and engage in real-time dialogue if appropriate. By demonstrating genuine interest in their responses or questions, you show them that you value their perspectives and opinions, further strengthening the connection between you as the speaker and them as listeners.

Building a strong connection with your audience is the ultimate goal of storytelling in speeches.

How to overcome common challenges

One of the most common challenges that individuals face when it comes to storytelling in speeches is finding the right balance between providing enough detail and keeping the audience engaged. It can be easy to get caught up in the details and provide too much information, which can overwhelm or bore listeners. On the other hand, providing too little detail can leave the audience feeling confused or uninterested. To overcome this challenge, speakers should aim to strike a balance by selecting key details that will enhance their story without overwhelming it.

Another common challenge in storytelling speeches is connecting with diverse audiences who may have different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. In order to overcome this challenge, speakers should strive for inclusivity by incorporating elements that resonate with a wide range of individuals. This could involve using examples or anecdotes that are relatable across various cultures or sharing personal stories that highlight universal emotions or struggles. By acknowledging and embracing diversity within their stories, speakers can captivate the audience and make a lasting impact on individuals from all walks of life.

Read more: How to create a storytelling mood board

Summarizing the key takeaways

Storytelling is a powerful communication tool that captivates audiences and enhances a speaker's credibility.
A compelling narrative consists of well-developed characters, a structured plot, conflict, and resolution.
Finding your authentic voice, embracing vulnerability, and being relatable are essential for effective storytelling.
Structuring a speech includes grabbing the audience's attention, presenting the thesis, sequencing stories, and delivering a memorable closing.
Visuals and multimedia can enhance storytelling but should be used judiciously.
Building empathy and using appropriate humor are key to connecting with your audience.
Overcome challenges like nerves and sensitive topics through techniques like breathing exercises, visualization, and practice.

By incorporating these storytelling techniques into your speeches, you can inspire, persuade, and leave a lasting impression on your audience.

Read more: The ultimate guide to storytelling with data

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8 Opening a Speech: Get Their Attention from the Start!

Man holding a prop while talking to an audience

Get the audience’s attention, or the rest of your speech is a waste. I mean it! Most people spend the majority of their speech preparation time working on the body of their speech and then they tack on an opening and a closing last minute.

The opening and closing deserve the most attention. Why? If you don’t get the audience’s attention and get them to pay attention to you instead of… the thoughts in their heads, their grocery lists, their neighbors, their social media…then all the rest of your brilliant content is wasted because they will never hear it. Lisa Marshall of Toastmasters International stresses the opening words are so important that “I spend 10 times more time developing and practicing the opener than any other part of the speech.”

Look at the description of Person A and Person B and tell me which person you like more.

Person A envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, and intelligent

Person B intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, and envious

If you are like most people, you have a preference for Person B. This illustrates a study by Solomon Ashe. He had subjects rate these two people using a string of descriptive words. Now look back at the descriptions. Look closely and you will notice they are the same words in a different order. Most people put the most emphasis on the first three words in determining how they will create the person. Like Asche’s subjects, your audience will be evaluating those first three words. Let’s bring it back around to speechmaking. The first sentence out of your mouth is crucial and the first three words are especially important.

I am sure you are not surprised to know that people form opinions quickly. To prove this, researchers showed subjects either a 20-minute clip of a job applicant or a 20-30 second clip of a job applicant. They were asked to rate the person on likeability and self-assurance. People were able to form an opinion in under thirty seconds. Not only that but they were able to form the same opinions from a 30-second clip as a 20-minute exposure.

The Battle for Attention

Remember that every piece of content in our modern era is part of an attention war. It’s fighting against thousands of other claims on people’s time and energy. This is true even when you’re standing on a stage in front of a seated audience. They have deadly distracters in their pockets called smartphones, which they can use to summon to their eyes a thousand outside alternatives. Once emails and texts make their claim, your talk may be doomed. And then there’s that lurking demon of modern life, fatigue. All these are lethal enemies. You never want to provide someone with an excuse to zone out. You have to be a savvy general directing this war’s outcome. Starting strong is one of your most important weapons. Chris Anderson, TED Talks, The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking.

“People don’t pay attention to boring things,” according to John Medina, author of Brain Rules, “You’ve got 30 seconds before they start asking the question, ‘Am I going to pay attention to you or not?'” It is important to get your audience’s attention right away. In this chapter, I will share with you several ways to win the war for attention and to start your speech right. I will show you the basic opening and closing structure of speeches and give you many examples of what that looks like. A speech, like an airplane, needs a good take-off and a good landing. Now it’s time to prepare to have a strong take-off and learn everything that goes into a speech introduction. This chapter is full of examples from a variety of talks. I included quotes from those introductions, but I also included links to each of those talks hoping you will be interested enough to want to listen.

Ways to Start a Speech

Chris Anderson likens this to battle. “First there is the 10-second war: can you do something in your first moments on stage to ensure people’s eager attention while you set up your talk topic? Second is the 1-minute war: can you then use that first minute to ensure that they’re committed to coming on the full talk journey with you?”

When thinking about your speech, spend a lot of time thinking about how to win the battle for their attention. Your introduction should make your audience want to put down their phones and listen. Your introduction should be so compelling they stop their wandering minds and turn their thoughts to you and you alone. Your introduction should start with three strong words where they form a strong opinion of you and your speech. Let me share how to accomplish this.

Capturing the audience through the story is one of the most powerful ways to start a speech. A story engages the brain in powerful ways and causes the audience’s brains to sync with the speakers. A well-told story will allow the audience to “see” things in their mind’s eye and to join the speaker’s emotions.

Watch this clip by Ric Elias for how he begins his speech with a powerful story. Particularly notice his first four words, “Imagine a big explosion.”

Imagine a big explosion as you climb through 3,000 ft. Imagine a plane full of smoke. Imagine an engine going clack, clack, clack. It sounds scary. Well, I had a unique seat that day. I was sitting in 1D. I was the only one who could talk to the flight attendants. So I looked at them right away, and they said, “No problem. We probably hit some birds.” The pilot had already turned the plane around, and we weren’t that far. You could see Manhattan. Two minutes later, three things happened at the same time.

Ric Elias, Three Things I Learned While My Plane Crashed.

Consider these other examples and notice how the speaker uses a story.

More powerful introductions using story:

I love you, I believe in you and it’s going to be OK. The three things that I needed to hear three years ago when I felt more abandoned than ever. I remember that day as if it happen this morning. It was Sunday and I had just woken up early at a brisk 12:30 in the afternoon. Ryan Brooks, Honesty, courage, and the importance of brushing your teeth. When I was nine years old I went off to summer camp for the first time. And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. Because in my family, reading was the primary group activity. And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us, it was really just a different way of being social. You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind. And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better. Susan Cain. The Power of Introverts. I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder: schizophrenia. Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight. A few years ago, I got one of those spam emails. I’m not quite sure how, but it turned up in my inbox, and it was from a guy called Solomon Odonkoh. James Veitch This is What Happens When You Reply to Spam Email. Eleven years ago, while giving birth to my first child, I hemorrhaged and was transfused with seven pints of blood. Four years later, I found out that I had been infected with the AIDS virus and had unknowingly passed it to my daughter, Ariel, through my breast milk, and my son, Jake, in utero. Elizabeth Glaser, Address to the 1992 Democratic National Convention.

Good stories immediately set the stage and introduce you to the place and to the people. Doing this helps your brain can form a structure where the story takes place. It helps you see the story unfold in your mind. If you need help starting a story, Vanessa Van Edwards suggests these prompts:

Once upon a time.
I’m here for a reason, and it’s an interesting story.
The best thing that ever happened to me was.

There is an entire chapter on the Power of Story that can be found here.

Humor is a rubber sword – it allows you to make a point without drawing blood. – Mary Hirsch

When Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane spoke at Harvard Commencemen t in the rain, he started with “There’s nowhere I would rather be on a day like this than around all this electrical equipment.” People laughed, people smiled, and the speech was off to a strong start. Humor works because it gives the audience a hit of the feel-good hormone dopamine. That is … if you are funny. If you decide to use humor, make sure you are funny. Test your humor on honest friends. In addition, the humor you use should fit your personality and your audience. Be warned, some groups would find humor inappropriate, do your research.

Watch this clip for how Tshering Tobgay begins his speech with humor.

In case you are wondering, no, I’m not wearing a dress, and no, I’m not saying what I’m wearing underneath. (Laughter) This is a go. This is my national dress. This is how all men dress in Bhutan. That is how our women dress. Like our women, we men get to wear pretty bright colors, but unlike our women, we get to show off our legs. Our national dress is unique, but this is not the only thing that’s unique about my country. Our promise to remain carbon neutral is also unique, and this is what I’d like to speak about today, our promise to remain carbon neutral.

Tshering Tobgay, This Country Isn’t Just Carbon Neutral–Its Carbon Negative.

More powerful introductions using humor

I didn’t rebel as a teenager. I started late and was still going at it the summer I turned thirty. I just became an American citizen, I divorced my husband, I got a big tattoo of a bat on my arm, and I joined a New York City punk band. Danusia Trevino, Guilty I need to make a confession at the outset here. A little over 20 years ago, I did something that I regret, something that I’m not particularly proud of. Something that, in many ways, I wish no one would ever know, but that here I feel kind of obliged to reveal. In the late 1980s, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I went to law school. Dan Pink, The Puzzle of Motivation. It is really interesting to be a woman and to get to 45 and to not be married yet and to not have kids, especially when you have pushed out your fifth kid on television. Tracee Ellis Ross, 2017 Glamour Woman of the Year. I am not drunk …but the doctor who delivered me was.” (reference the shake she has due to a botched medical procedure at birth causing her cerebral palsey). Maysoon Zayid, I’ve Got 99 Prolbems and Cerebral Palsey is Not One of Them .

Salutation followed by humor

Oh boy, thank you so much, thank you so much. Thank you, President Cowan, Mrs. President Cowen; distinguished guests, undistinguished guests, you know who you are, honored faculty and creepy Spanish teacher. And thank you to all the graduating Class of 2009, I realize most of you are hungover and have splitting headaches and haven’t slept since Fat Tuesday, but you can’t graduate ’til I finish, so listen up. When I was asked to make the commencement speech, I immediately said yes. Then I went to look up what commencement meant which would have been easy if I had a dictionary, but most of the books in our house are Portia’s, and they’re all written in Australian. So I had to break the word down myself, to find out the meaning. Commencement: common, and cement, common cement. You commonly see cement on sidewalks. Sidewalks have cracks, and if you step on a crack, you break your mother’s back. So there’s that. But I’m honored that you’ve asked me here to speak at your common cement Ellen DeGenres, Commencement Speech at Tulane. Well, thank you. Thank you Mr. President, First Lady, King Abdullah of Jordan, Norm, distinguished guests. Please join me in praying that I don’t say something we’ll all regret. That was for the FCC. If you’re wondering what I’m doing here, at a prayer breakfast, well so am I. I’m certainly not here as a man of the cloth, unless that cloth is — is leather. Bono at the 54th annual National Prayer Breakfast.

Starting your speech by sharing a little-known fact, can be powerful. For this to fully work, you need to have the audience’s attention from the very first word. Read on for how these speakers started strong.

Powerful introductions using facts

Sadly, in the next 18 minutes when I do our chat, four Americans that are alive will be dead from the food that they eat. Jamie Oliver, Teach Every Child About Food. So I want to start by offering you a free, no-tech life hack, and all it requires of you is this: that you change your posture for two minutes. Amy Cuddy, Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are. Okay, now I don’t want to alarm anybody in this room, but it’s just come to my attention that the person to your right is a liar. (Laughter) Also, the person to your left is a liar. Also the person sitting in your very seats is a liar. We’re all liars. What I’m going to do today is I’m going to show you what the research says about why we’re all liars, how you can become a lie spotter and why you might want to go the extra mile and go from lie spotting to truth seeking, and ultimately to trust building. Pamela Meyer, How to Spot a Liar. You will live 7.5 minutes longer than you would have otherwise, just because you watched this talk. Jane McGonigal. The Game That Can Give You Ten Extra Years of Life. There are 900,000 divorces in the United States of America every year. Fewer than 10% of them ever talked to anybody about their relationship. So why would you need a science? Well, we need a science to develop effective treatment and understanding of how to make love work. Why? Why should we care about having great relationships? Well, it turns out that in the past 50 years, a field called social epidemiology has emerged, and it shows that great friendships, great love relationships between lovers and parents and children lead to greater health – mental health as well as physical health – greater wealth, greater resilience, faster recovery from illness, greater longevity – if you want to live 10 to 15 years longer, work on your relationships, not just your exercise – and more successful children as well. John Gottman. The Science of Love. This room may appear to be holding 600 people but there is actually so many more because within each of us there is a multiple of personalities. Elizabeth Lesser, Take the Other to Lunch.

Using a physical object can draw the audience’s attention. Make sure you plan the timing of the prop, and you practice with it. It is important that it is large enough for the audience to see and they can see it well enough that they are not frustrated. Depending on your speech, it may be appropriate to put it away, so it is not distracting.

Powerful introductions using props

Darren Tay walks onto the stage and stares at the audience. He pulls a pair of underwear out of his pocket and puts them on over his suit. “Hey loser how do you like your new school uniform. I think it looks great on you. Those were the words of my high school bully Greg Upperfield. Now if you are all wondering if the underwear that Greg used was clean, I had the same questions. Darren Tay, Outsmart, Outlast. Toastmasters 2016 World Champion of Public Speaking . Mohammed Qahtani walks onstage, puts a cigarette in his mouth … then looks up as if noticing the audience and says, “What?” As the audience laughs, he continues. “Oh, you all think smoking kills? Ha-ha, let me tell you something. Do you know that the amount of people dying from diabetes are three times as many [as the] people dying from smoking? Yet if I pulled out a Snickers bar, nobody would say anything.” He goes on to say, his facts are made up and his real topic is about how words have power. Mohammed Qahtani, Toastmasters 2015 World Champion of Public Speaking

JA Gamach blows a train whistle and then starts his speech as if he were a conductor, “All aboard! It’s a bright sunny day and you are taking a train. You are wearing a pair of sandals you proudly made yourself. As you board the train one of your sandals slips off and falls beside the track. (J.A. loses one sandal that falls down the platform.) You try to retrieve it. Too late. The train starts to pull away. What would you have done? I would have cursed my bad luck, mad at losing a sandal. JA Gamache, Toastmasters 2007 World Championship.

Use a Quotation

Powerful introductions using quotes.

Rules for using quotes

Be sure to use the quote purposefully and not just as placeholders.
Quotes can just take up valuable space where you could put content unless they are not properly used.
Let the quote be more important than the author. When using a quote at the opening, say the quote first and then the author. When using a quote at the end of a speech, say the author first and then the quote.
Keep it short and sweet. Use a quote that gets to the point quickly.
If you must use long quotes–put them on your slide.
If you project a quote, read it to the audience. Never expect them to read it while you talk about something else. Never say stupid things like, “You can read, I’ll let you read this for yourselves” or “Your adults, I’ll let you process this.”
Check the authorship and authenticity of the quote. There are so many quotes on the internet that are misattributed and misquoted. For example, who wrote the quote: “They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel”?
Do not go for the overused quote or your audience is prone to dismiss it. Instead of quoting an overused “I have a dream quote” do as Jim Key, the 2003 Toastmasters International World Championship of Public Speaking did and pick an equally great but lesser-used Martin Luther King Quote: “The time is always right to do what is right!”

Watch Nate Stauffer at a Moth Grand Slam as he uses poetry to start and carry his story.

Watch this clip for how Andrew Solomon opens with a quote to make us think about depression.

Andrew Solomon, Depression, The Secret We Share.

Reference the Occasion

Ceremonial speeches often call for acknowledgment of those in attendance or a mention of the occasion. Here is how Martin Luther King Junior set up his famous speech. I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Martin Luther King Junior, I Have a Dream.

Get the Audience Involved

Having the audience stand, raise their hand, or even nod in encouragement can cause them to focus on your message. This can be particularly helpful if the audience has been sitting for a while. Let me show you a few examples of how that works.

Ask a Question

You can involve the audience from the start by asking them a question.

Watch the first few minutes of Amy Purdy’s speech and how she starts with a question, “ If your life were a book and you were the author, how would you want your story to go?”

Have the Audience Participate

If you ask a question you want the audience to answer, be sure to give them time to respond. If they raise their hands, be sure to acknowledge their response. You might have the answer by standing, by raising their hands, by speaking to their neighbor. You might call on one member of the audience to answer for the group.

If you ask a question you want the audience to answer, don’t let your presentation slide give away the answer. For example, one speaker had a slide behind him that said, “Lesson 1: Don’t Worry About IQ.” He has the audience raise their hand if they want to improve their grades then he asks, “So can I get a show of hands, how many would say IQ is going to be the most important to get those marks to go up?” Very few people responded because the answer was “written on the wall” literally.

Watch this clip as Allan Pease engages the audience.

Everybody hold your right hand in front like this in a handshaking position. Uncross your legs. Relaxed position. Right hand in front. When I say the word, “Now” here’s what we’re going to do. I am going to ask you to turn to someone besides you, shake hands as if you’re meeting for the first time, and keep pumping till I ask you to stop. Then you’ll stop and freeze it and we’re going to analyze what’s happening. You got that? You don’t have time to think about this. Do it now. Pick anybody and pump. Pump, everybody. Freeze it. Hold it. Stop. Hold it. Freeze it. Keep your hands locked. Keep them locked. The person whose hand is most on top is saying “I’ll be the boss for the rest of the day.” Allan Pease, Body Language, the Power is in the Palm of Your Hands.

More powerful introductions using audience participation

I have a confession to make. But first, I want you to make a little confession to me. In the past year, I want you to just raise your hand if you’ve experienced relatively little stress? Kelly McGonigal, How to Make Stress Your Friend. So I’d like to start, if I may, by asking you some questions. If you’ve ever lost someone you truly loved, ever had your heartbroken, ever struggled through an acrimonious divorce, or being the victim of infidelity, please stand up. If standing up isn’t accessible to you, you can put your hand up. Please stay standing and keep your hand up there. If you’ve ever lived through a natural disaster, being bullied or made redundant, stand on up. If you’ve ever had a miscarriage, if you’ve ever had an abortion or struggled through infertility, please stand up. Finally, if you or anyone you love has had to cope with mental illness, dementia, some form of physical impairment or cope with suicide, please stand up. Look around you. Adversity doesn’t discriminate. If you are alive, you are going to have to, or you’ve already had to, deal with some tough times Thank you, everyone. Take a seat. Lucy Hone: The Three Secrets of Resilient People. Advice from Moth Storytelling Club Have a great first line that sets up the stakes and grabs attention No: “So I was thinking about climbing this mountain. But then I watched a little TV and made a snack and took a nap and my mom called and vented about her psoriasis then I did a little laundry (a whites load) (I lost another sock, darn it!) and then I thought about it again and decided I’d climb the mountain the next morning.” Yes: “The mountain loomed before me. I had my hunting knife, some trail mix and snow boots. I had to make it to the little cabin and start a fire before sundown or freeze to death for sure.”

Arouse Suspense or Curiosity

Watch this clip for how Kathryn Schulz creates curiosity by showing us Johnny Depp’s tattoo and then talks about her tattoo of regret. We hang on to her every word wondering, “Where is all this going and how bad can her tattoo really be?”

So that’s Johnny Depp, of course. And that’s Johnny Depp’s shoulder. And that’s Johnny Depp’s famous shoulder tattoo. Some of you might know that, in 1990, Depp got engaged to Winona Ryder, and he had tattooed on his right shoulder “Winona forever.” And then three years later — which in fairness, kind of is forever by Hollywood standards — they broke up, and Johnny went and got a little bit of repair work done. And now his shoulder says, “Wino forever.”

Kathryn Schulz, Don’t Regret, Regret.

Saying unexpected things or challenging assumptions can get a speech started off right. A herd of wildebeests, a shoal of fish, a flock of birds. Many animals gather in large groups that are among the most wonderful spectacles in the natural world. But why do these groups form? The common answers include things like seeking safety in numbers or hunting in packs or gathering to mate or breed, and all of these explanations, while often true, make a huge assumption about animal behavior, that the animals are in control of their own actions, that they are in charge of their bodies. And that is often not the case. Ed Yong. Zombie Roaches and Other Parasite Tales. TED Talk

Keys to Success

Memorize your first sentence so you can deliver it with impact. Memorize your whole speech opening if possible. Make sure your first three words have an impact.

Typical Patterns for Speech Openings

Get the audience’s attention–called a hook or a grabber.
Establish rapport and tell the audience why you care about the topic of why you are credible to speak on the topic.
Introduce the speech thesis/preview/good idea.
Tell the audience why they should care about this topic.
Give a transition statement to the body of the speech.

Step Two: Credibility

First, you hook the audience with your powerful grabber, then you tell them why you are credible to speak on the topic and why the topic is important. If they know your credentials, you would not need to tell them your credibility but you may still want to tell them why you are interested in the topic. Here are a few examples of how some speakers included credibility.

Tell Why You Are Credible

I’m a doctor, but I kind of slipped sideways into research, and now I’m an epidemiologist. Ben Goldacre, Battling Bad Science. I started studying resilience research a decade ago at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It was an amazing time to be there because the professors who trained me had just picked up the contract to train all 1.1 million American soldiers to be as mentally fit as they always have been physically fit. Lucy Hone: The Three Secrets of Resilient People. What I’m going to do is to just give a few notes, and this is from a book I’m preparing called “Letters to a Young Scientist.” I’d thought it’d be appropriate to present it, on the basis that I have had extensive experience in teaching, counseling scientists across a broad array of fields. And you might like to hear some of the principles that I’ve developed in doing that teaching and counseling. EO Wilson: Advice to a Young Scientist.

Step Three: Tell Why it is Important

Early on in your speech, you should tell the audience why they should care. You should connect the speech to things they care about. This is where you answer, so what, who cares?

You know, I didn’t set out to be a parenting expert. In fact, I’m not very interested in parenting, per se. It’s just that there’s a certain style of parenting these days that is kind of messing up kids, impeding their chances to develop. Julie Lythcott-Haims, How to Raise Successful Kids – Without Over-Parenting

Step Four: Tell the Purpose of the Talk (aka Preview/ Thesis)

“If you don’t know what you want to achieve in your presentation your audience never will.” – Harvey Diamond, author

Tell the audience your purpose, clearly give them an overview of the main points. MIT professor, Patrick Winston says one of the best things to add to your speech is an empowerment promise. You want to tell people what they will know at the end of your speech that they didn’t know at the beginning. It’s their reason for being here. His empowerment promise was, “Today you will see some examples of what you can put in your armory of speaking techniques and it will be the case that one of those examples–some heuristic, some technique, maybe only one will be the one that will get you the job. By the end of the next 60 minutes, you will have been exposed to a lot of ideas, some of which you will incorporate into your own repertoire, and they will ensure that you get the maximum opportunity to have your ideas valued and accepted by the people you speak with.” Notice that this statement told you what to expect and why it mattered.

Here are examples of how various speakers accomplished this.

For years, I’ve been telling people, stress makes you sick. It increases the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease. Basically, I’ve turned stress into the enemy. But I have changed my mind about stress, and today, I want to change yours. Kelly McGonigal, How to Make Stress Your Friend. We’ve been sold the lie that disability is a Bad Thing, capital B, capital T. It’s a bad thing, and to live with a disability makes you exceptional. It’s not a bad thing, and it doesn’t make you exceptional. Stella Young, I’m Not Your Inspiration, Thank You Very Much

What I’m going to show you is all of the main things, all of the main features of my discipline, evidence-based medicine. And I will talk you through all of these and demonstrate how they work, exclusively using examples of people getting stuff wrong. Ben Goldacre, Battling Bad Science. I would like to think that we (Arab women) poor, oppressed women actually have some useful, certainly hard-earned lessons to share, lessons that might turn out useful for anyone wishing to thrive in the modern world. Here are three of mine. Leila Hoteit, Three Lessons on Success from an Arab businesswoman We are often terrified and fascinated by the power hackers now have. They scare us. But the choices they make have dramatic outcomes that influence us all. So I am here today because I think we need hackers, and in fact, they just might be the immune system for the information age. Sometimes they make us sick, but they also find those hidden threats in our world, and they make us fix it. Keren Elazari. Hackers: The Internet’s Immune System Try This — Inspired by TED Master Class After you write your thesis, send it to three people with the question, “Based on what you read here, what do you think my speech will be about?”

Putting It All Together

At this point, you know you need to have a grabber, a preview, a credibility statement, and a so-what-who-cares statement. Let’s take a look at one of the top TED talks of all time by Jamie Oliver. This speech is a good illustration of everything we’ve been talking about so far and how all this works together.

“Everybody close your eyes.”

I don’t want to close my eyes; it makes me feel awkward and exposed to be in a group of people with my eyes closed. Because of that, I keep my eyes open. The problem is when I keep my eyes open, I feel like some sort of horrible nonconformist rebel. I feel awkward with my eyes closed and I feel guilty if they are open. Either way, I just feel bad. Besides, half of the time when speakers tell audience members to close their eyes, they forget to tell us when we can open them. If you are wanting me to imagine a story, just tell me to imagine it, don’t make me close my eyes (rant over).

“Can everybody hear me?”

You should plan your opening to be intentional and with power. “Can everybody hear me” is a weak and uncertain statement and this is not the first impression you want to leave. Do a microphone check before the audience members arrive and have someone stand in different corners of the room to make sure you can be heard. Don’t waste your valuable speech time with questions that you should already know the answer to.

“How long do I have to speak?”

You should know that before you begin. Even if the presentations for the day are running over and you are the last speaker, you should ask the MC before you begin. Always plan your first words with power.

“Can you read this?”

You should make your slides big, really big. Test out your slides in advance of your speech, walk all around the room and make sure you can read them. Have a friend check them out as well. You should know they are big enough because you planned for it and tested it.

“Turn off your cell phones and laptops.”

People really hate having things taken away, not to mention that your audience may want to take notes on their devices. Chances are you are speaking to adults, let them determine if it is appropriate to have out their technology.

“I’m sorry, I’m losing my voice.” “I’m stopped up.” “I’m under the weather.”

Stop apologizing! Stop making excuses! While these lines may be true, they just come of as excuses and can make the audience either feel like you don’t want to be there, or they just feel sorry for you.

“I’m so nervous right now.”

Talking about your nervousness will make you more nervous and will make them look for signs of your nervousness. Just start your speech.

“So, Um, Ok.”

Do not start with hesitation. Plan the first words, memorize the first words, practice the first words. Do not start with “Ok, so um, now I’d like…” Plan strong and start strong.

Do Not Discuss Your Business with People Watching…Really! I Mean It! Many of us are giving and listening to presentations in an online format. I have attended numerous presentations this year through Zoom where I have to sit and watch while the organizers engage in personal small talk or deal with the details of the presentation. This is how the speech I recently attended began. “Donna, you are going to share your screen, right?” “Yes. I have my PowerPoint ready to go. Will you push “record” when I give the signal?” “Sure. Where did you say that button is again? Do you think we should wait five more minutes, I think we had more who were coming? Dave, what was the total we were expecting?” “Yeah, we had 116 sign up, but the reminders went out late so this may be all we have. We can give them a few more minutes to log on.” “Donna, How is your dog? Is she still struggling with her cone since her spay surgery? My dog never would wear the cone –she tore her stitches out and broke her wound open. It was terrible. Well, it looks like it is about time to begin, thank you everyone for coming.” If you are organizing an event online, hosting a speech online, giving a presentation online–please keep it professional. Most platforms will allow you to keep the audience in a waiting room until it is time to start. If you have a business to deal with, keep the audience out until you have everything ready to go. Once the audience is in the meeting, you should engage the audience in group-type small talk or you should just start the presentation. In professional settings, you should start the meeting on time. Why punish those who showed up on time to wait for those who aren’t there yet?

A Conversation Over Coffee with Bill Rogers

I asked my long-time friend, Bill Rogers, to write an excerpt to add to the book. I met Bill when he was the Chief Development Officer for a hospital in Northwest Arkansas and I met him again when he was reinventing himself as a college student getting a Master’s Degree in the theater. He would love to share a symbolic cup of coffee with you and give you advice about public speaking.

Perfect morning for a walk, isn’t it? Join me for a cup of coffee? Wonderful. Find us a table and I’ll get our coffee.

There you go; just like you like it. There’s nothing like a great cup of coffee on the patio of your neighborhood coffee shop, is there?

Now that you’re settled in your favorite chair, take a sip, and let that glorious caffeine kick in and do its stuff. Okay, let’s talk.

So, you were asking me about public speaking.

Well, let’s see. Where do we begin?

One of the first pieces of advice I ever received was to imagine that every member of your audience is sitting there in their underwear! Yeah, right. That never worked for me. I tried it once with a local civic group of community leaders both male and female. If the intent of that tidbit is to make you relax, it certainly didn’t work for me. It just made me more self-conscious…and more nervous. I not only got distracted, but I also lost my train of thought, I started sweating, and, of course, imagined myself standing there without clothes. Needless to say, that speech was a disaster and I’ve never used it again. I suggest you don’t either.

In the early days, I also relied very heavily on my typed-up speech. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that unless you find yourself reading it word for word as I did. Nothing is more boring nor puts an audience to sleep quicker than a speaker with their nose down reading a speech. There’s no connection and connection with your audience is key.

As you know, I love theatre and I’ve done a bit of acting over the years. Early on, I learned that the quicker I learned my lines, the more I could play, experiment, and shape my character. It relaxed me and gave me enormous freedom. It led me to find a mantra for myself: “With discipline comes freedom.” This freedom will allow you to improvise as your audience or situation dictates while still conveying the core message of your presentation. That discipline and its resulting freedom apply to public speaking of any kind and, I think, will serve you well.

Another old adage we’ve all heard is Aristotle’s advice. You know the one. No? Well, roughly, it’s to tell your audience what you’re going to say, say it, and then tell them what you just said. That’s the basic formula for public speaking. And it works as a good place to start.

However, effective speaking is much more and, to me, it starts with a story or even a simple sentence.

You know the feeling you get when you read the first sentence of a good book and it just reaches out and grabs you? That should be your goal with every presentation. One sentence to capture your audience’s attention. Something that causes them to lean forward. Something that sparks their imagination.

It doesn’t have to be all that profound either. It can be something very simple. A personal story that relates to your topic. A relevant fact or statistic that defines or illustrates the issue or subject matter at hand.

A couple of classics come to mind. The first is Alice Walker’s, “The Color of Purple.”

“You better not tell nobody but God.”

And the second one is from my favorite novel, “To Kill A Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee.

“When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm broken at the elbow.”

Both sentences hook you immediately. A few simple words speak volumes. After reading or hearing those words, you naturally lean in. You want to learn more. You want to find out what happens next. Every effective speech or presentation does the same thing.

Of course, make sure that the first and last thing you say to your audience is both relevant and appropriate. I share this out of an abundance of caution. I once worked for an internationally recognized and well-respected children’s research hospital and I was given the privilege to speak at a national educational convention. The room was filled wall to wall with teachers. I thought I’d be cute and add a little levity. I opened my presentation with this line, “You know, I’ve had nightmares like this…” Instead of the roars of laughter, I was expecting, a wave of silence ensued. Not only was the line not funny, but it was also wholly inappropriate and I immediately lost my audience. Not my best day. Learn from my mistakes.

Finally, let’s touch on the importance of approaching a speech as a conversation. You and I are sitting here enjoying our coffee and having a friendly, relaxed conversation. Strive for that every chance you get. You may not always have that luxury. Some speeches and presentations simply demand formality. But even in those cases, you can usually make it somewhat conversational. I always try to write my speeches in a conversational style. Like I’m talking to a friend…or trying to make a new one.

So, to recap: tell a story, learn your lines, hook your audience with a simple sentence, close with a question or call to action, use repetition, keep it conversational, treat your audience as a friend, and give yourself permission to relax.

Above all, be yourself. Allow yourself to be as relaxed as you are with those closest to you. If you’re relaxed, if you try to think of your audience as a friend, then, in most cases, they too will relax and they will root for you. Even if they disagree with what you are telling them, they will respect you and they will listen.

How about another cup?

Key Takeaways

Remember This!

The most important part of your speech is the introduction because if you don’t get their attention, they are not listening to the rest of what you have to say.
To get attention, tell a story, use humor, share a quote, tell a startling fact, show a prop, ask a question, reference the occasion.
In addition to the grabber, a good introduction should establish rapport and tell the audience why you are credible.
An introduction often includes a “so what who cares statement” to tell the audience why this should matter to them.
The thesis/preview should be clear enough that someone could read just that sentence or couple of sentences and know what the speech is about.

Please share your feedback, suggestions, corrections, and ideas.

I want to hear from you.

Do you have an activity to include? Did you notice a typo that I should correct? Are you planning to use this as a resource and do you want me to know about it? Do you want to tell me something that really helped you?

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Veitch, J. (2015). This is what happens when you reply to spam email. Ted Talk. [Video] YouTube. https://www.ted.com/talks/james_veitch_this_is_what_happens_when_you_reply_to_spam_email?language=en Standard YouTube License.

Wilson, E.O. (2012). Advice to a young scientist. [Video] YouTube. https://www.ted.com/talks/e_o_wilson_advice_to_a_young_scientist?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare Standard YouTube License.

Winston, P. (2019). How to speak by Patrick Winston.[Video] YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY Standard YouTube License.

Yong, E. (2014). Zombie roaches and other parasite tales. TED Talk [Video] YouTube. https://www.ted.com/talks/ed_yong_zombie_roaches_and_other_parasite_tales?language=en Standard YouTube License.

Young, S. (2014). I’m not your inspiration, thank you very much. [Video] YouTube. https://www.ted.com/talks/stella_young_i_m_not_your_inspiration_thank_you_very_much?language=en Standard YouTube License.

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The Anatomy of a Story

Perfect your narrative with time-tested themes..

By Jesse Scinto, MS, DTM

Man in suit gesturing while telling story

An aspiring young singer takes the stage. As the music plays, her timid voice begins to soar. The skeptical audience quickly warms to the performance. As luck would have it, a well-known music executive is in the crowd that night. He offers to take her under his wing. She’s been discovered.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the plot from the Academy Award-winning film A Star is Born —a film so popular it has been remade three times. Its appeal is rooted in the classic rags-to-riches story line, a compelling narrative that has been told for centuries in literature, music, and theater. Good stories follow familiar patterns that spark recognition in the audience, with universal themes that are inherently satisfying.

When you write a speech, how do you make it engaging? Professional speechwriters frequently note that storytelling is paramount. But they don’t always say what goes into a good story.

As a lecturer in the strategic communication program at Columbia University in New York, New York, and an independent speech and presentation coach, I find that the elements seen in a strong story arc are also key to persuasive speaking. In Toastmasters, we weave stories—funny, somber, insightful, relatable—into our speeches for the same purpose: to persuade, inform, influence, or inspire.

The impact of a story begins in its bones—the basic structure that supports many varied narratives, such as the rags-to-riches story arc. As you prepare to write your next speech, use these points to perfect your narrative and become a more compelling speaker.

The Hero’s Journey

In his groundbreaking 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces , cultural anthropologist Joseph Campbell argues that the world’s great myths and creation stories follow the same basic plot:

Life in the village is normal until one day an urgent problem arises—such as a menacing dragon. A hero accepts the challenge and goes on a quest to find and slay the dragon. Obstacles arise along the way, and the hero considers giving up. But in a moment of insight, the hero realizes what must be done to succeed. Our hero musters the resolve to slay the dragon and returns home triumphant, with new knowledge and experience. Order is restored.

Of course, it’s not always a dragon. Sometimes the challenge is more personal or spiritual, such as a quest for self-knowledge or enlightenment. But the basic journey is there: a call to adventure, mounting difficulties, a moment of insight, climactic action, order restored.

Master storytellers use structure—or the strategic ordering of events—to propel a story forward. The underlying structure may go unnoticed by listeners or readers who are wrapped up in the drama. But a well-structured story taps into audience expectations and stokes anticipation. It’s the same for speech stories. We just have less time to get to the point—minutes, not hours.

In its most basic form, story structure involves a hero, a complication, and a resolution. And the “hero” is often you, the speaker. In addition, you should make the connection between the hero’s journey and why it’s relevant to the audience (more on that later).

Complication-Resolution Structure

The order in which you present the narrative—complication, then resolution—is critical, because the complication grabs the listeners’ attention and makes them eager to find out what happens next. They want to learn vicariously from others’ mistakes and avoid the same pitfalls—or follow the footsteps of a successful mission.

Building on the complication-resolution foundation, Hollywood screenwriter Robert McKee, an expert on structuring film scripts, explains additional elements in his book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting . These include:

1 Setup.

Describe the hero/main character in a life-as-usual setting. Provide a few key details to help the audience relate, but don’t spend too much time here. You need to get to the action or risk losing attention.

2 Inciting incident.

Describe the urgent problem that throws life out of balance for the hero. It can be something external, like getting a flat tire on a busy highway. Or it could be internal, like the realization that you’re no longer happy in your career. The inciting incident generally comes early in the story, to hook the audience. It kicks off the journey.

3 Progressive complications.

The hero’s first attempt to “slay the dragon” may not succeed, which means they must try harder. Describe additional problems that crop up, whether external or internal (self-doubt, for example). Progressive complications hold the audience’s attention, as they wonder how the hero will pull through.

4 Insight.

Describe the breakthrough moment when the hero realizes what must be done to achieve success or to reach a new level of being. This insight informs the hero’s next action.

5 Climax and resolution.

Slay the dragon. Describe the action that finally brings the journey to an end and restores equilibrium in the hero’s life.

6 Lesson.

In a film or novel, the lesson may be left to the audience’s interpretation. In a speech, we state it explicitly and relate it to the audience.

A Toastmaster’s Tale

Aaron Beverly masterfully used these elements at the 2019 World Championship of Public Speaking® in his winning speech, An Unbelievable Story .

Beverly quickly set up the dramatic possibilities by reliving his experience at the wedding of dear friends, from both Indian and white families. Beverly, who noted he was the only black man at the festivities, enthusiastically donned the traditional attire for an Indian wedding (which he wore while delivering the speech).

Conflict and humor ensue as Beverly accepts the critical mission of protecting the groom’s shoes from bridesmaids determined to steal them. If he failed, Beverly noted, the groom would pay a healthy ransom for his footwear.

Toastmasters World Champion of Public Speaking Aaron Beverly speaking onstage

He is certain of his success, noting over and over that he takes the mission very seriously. However, a number of obstacles are thrown his way, as the bridesmaids try many clever tricks to fool him into giving up the shoes. He manages to fend off every wily attempt until at last he is outnumbered by additional members of the wedding party, and the shoes are wrested from his grasp.

Beverly moves here into insight, resolution, and a lesson. “The context behind the game,” he noted, “was really to help the families get to know one another better” and to welcome him into the culture and festivities of the day. He learned that open hearts and open cultures help us avoid the “impossible stories” that doom so many human relationships.

He asks the audience to practice “acceptance despite difference.” His final call to action: “This is your mission—and I ask you to take it very seriously.” Applause, cheers, championship.

Authenticity and Relevance

Core storytelling elements create even more spellbinding stories when applied to tales of personal experience—the most original content we can offer. Audiences crave first-hand accounts. They want to hear observations and insights from someone who lived through an experience. When we share openly, we show our humanity and allow the audience to identify with us.

The late Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs used these techniques in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University , with the story of his painful yet invaluable self-discovery following being fired from the company he built. (See page 19 for an analysis.)

Unless the goal is mere entertainment, speech stories must have a purpose. Likewise, we should all be clear about our purpose and frame our stories for audience consumption. That means explicitly stating the lesson and relating it to the audience, a storytelling action that Toastmasters practice regularly, from the club to world championship levels.

I began this piece by describing a scene from A Star Is Born about an unknown singer who achieves success beyond her wildest dreams. My purpose? To illustrate the value of familiar patterns in stories. A Star Is Born is a story with wide appeal; we all want to have our talents recognized and be seen for who we are.

In your next speech, show your talent with a well-told story. Watch the audience lean in.

Learn additional storytelling tips in the video below from Toastmaster and educator Erin Gruwell.

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Presentation Skills

Everyone Has a Story

How to dig in and discover your own.

Craig Harrison, DTM, PDG

Storytelling in the Age of Video

A social media influencer in India credits use of authentic stories with strong audience engagement.

Mary Nesfield

TAKE YOUR STORIES ALONG IN PATHWAYS

The Pathways learning experience —also places a high value on storytelling in speeches. Here are a few tips from “Connect with Storytelling,” an elective project available in all 11 paths in Pathways.

Use vivid descriptions. Descriptive language that evokes specific imagery helps paint a mental picture for your audience. “A good storyteller’s eloquent descriptions can transport [your] audience to another place and time.”
Consider your tone. When deciding on your story’s content, be aware of the occasion and your audience. Share a story that resonates positively. “A story told at a wedding or funeral may be moving, funny, or both. The most important component in choosing your topic is relating it to the audience and the event.”
Use expressive dialogue. If dialogue is part of your story, share the words that are said. “Write it out in the format of a script with characters saying the lines. The best storytellers take on different roles as they tell a story.”

A STORY WITHIN THE STORY: THE IRONIC TWIST

Many powerful personal stories include an ironic twist—an unexpected resolution that feels true to life. Listeners want to know what it’s like to suffer defeat and rise from the ashes.

In his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University , the late Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs gave a first-hand account of that twist—and how losing his company was the best thing that ever happened to him.

Here’s a brief analysis of an excerpt from that speech:

SETUP – I was lucky—I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage to a 2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We had just released our finest creation—the Macintosh—a year earlier, and I had just turned 30.

INCITING INCIDENT – And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

PROGRESSIVE COMPLICATIONS – I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down—that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from [Silicon Valley].

INSIGHT – But something slowly began to dawn on me—I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love.

CLIMAX – And so I decided to start over. I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

RESOLUTION – During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story , and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed together at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

LESSON – I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love.

( Source: bit.ly/TI_Stanford )

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How to Start a Speech with a Story

by Alan | Feb 2, 2018 | Communication skills , public speaking , Storytelling

Alan Hoffler Keynote Speaker on how to start a speech public speaking

The question of how to start a speech seems simple and there are several ways to open your presentation. Using a story is a great way to start a speech.

I just attended the fabulous KEY5 Conference in Charlotte, NC. The concept is simple – put professional speakers on the stage for five minutes, create top-notch videos of them, and capture audience testimonials. Think TEDx, demo reel, conference, and marketing push all mixed together. Every one of the speakers had something worthwhile to say and the audience was never put to sleep because the event moved really fast. Every speaker did a FANTASTIC job.

But I have some inside information. I helped coach many of the speakers. It was one of the few times I have gotten to see the live delivery of a speech I’ve coached. That was a special treat. But there is one other surprise. I was also one of the speakers at the event. Five minutes to get my message out. I felt that people would expect me to be at least decent. And I wanted to be much more than decent.

It was probably the toughest speech I’ve ever written. I was trying out new material (a no-no when the stakes are high – try it in a risk-free environment first!). I was slammed for time and utilized a skill I perfected in college – procrastination. I had preached to the speakers in our monthly coaching calls that the way to write a five-minute speech is not to trim your one-hour keynote, but to build a new speech from the ground up. I did just that. My core message was fleshed out a long time ago and it was solid. I had to make some decisions about which example, story, and data backed up my points the best (and in some cases, the fastest), but I was happy with the core block of my talk. It was just under four minutes.

It was the open and close where I was struggling. The opening I wanted to use was the personal backdrop of why the topic (coaching and self-evaluation) is important to me. I could easily use 20 minutes to hash that out. The trimmed version was over three minutes. That won’t do for an intro to a five-minute talk (I usually use the guideline to use about 10% of your talk time for an open AND a close combined). I was at a frustrating crossroads driven by the external constraint of time.

The saving way out came in the form of my own teaching on how to start a speech. I led a discussion for part of our fantastic PRiSM Speaker’s practice group the day before I left for the conference.

We were discussing… openers and how to start a speech. Few people doubt that stories top the list, but the #1 question is always “ How do I know what story to use? ” I had the answer. Find your core message. Reduce it to a sentence or a phrase. Then brainstorm stories that talk about or imply that singular point. Make the segue to your content. And come back and end the way you started.

As I was helping lead this discussion by using some examples from our group, I had one of those sky-parting-angels-singing moments. “ Hey, speech coach! Why don’t you do that on your own speech! ” There was one complication, I had almost no time to sit and brainstorm and think. So I used the three-hour commute to the conference and the Bluetooth connection to my truck and my phone to record my new opening. The new opening did nothing I originally set out to do – covering why the topic mattered to me. And that probably violates rule #1 (it’s not about me) anyway. But it did what I said it would do. It got me into my content (in 37 seconds) and gave me an exit and call to action at the end. And when I sat down to compose what my phone recordings were telling me worked, it took less than 15 minutes to have it all ironed out. I was very pleased with the result. My experience doing this for others helps, to be sure, but once you have the message hook and use it to start a speech, it’s a relatively easy task to find an opener.

The morals of this story:

Moral #1: if you believe in your system/product/secret enough to sell it to clients, it better work for you!

Moral #2: Don’t be so married to your content that you are not willing to change it. More than one speaker told me they resisted my suggestions to their speech, but their practice and their frustration eventually told them they should just give up and take the suggestions.

By the way. Several of the speakers confessed that they spent over 40 hours preparing their five-minute speeches. I meandered into the room late on the eve of the big show and there was a speaker on the stage practicing. The next time you see a keynote speaker and think it’s easy work, please reconsider your position.

How much time are you willing to spend to make your next meeting, talk, or message stand out?

We will give you insights on how to start a story in our Power of Storytelling in Business and Life workshop. We also cover how to segue to and from the story, how to make it interesting, making sure your audience applies your story, and how to practice storytelling. Great speakers tell stories well. Come and join us to find out how!

Communication matters, what are YOU saying?

This article was published in the February 2018 edition of our monthly speaking tips email, Communication Matters. Have speaking tips like these delivered straight to your inbox every month. Sign up today and receive our FREE download, “Twelve Tips that will Save You from Making a Bad Presentation.” You can unsubscribe at any time.

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15 Powerful Speech Opening Lines (And How to Create Your Own)

Hrideep barot.

Public Speaking , Speech Writing

Powerful speech opening lines set the tone and mood of your speech. It’s what grips the audience to want to know more about the rest of your talk.

The first few seconds are critical. It’s when you have maximum attention of the audience. And you must capitalize on that!

Instead of starting off with something plain and obvious such as a ‘Thank you’ or ‘Good Morning’, there’s so much more you can do for a powerful speech opening (here’s a great article we wrote a while ago on how you should NOT start your speech ).

To help you with this, I’ve compiled some of my favourite openings from various speakers. These speakers have gone on to deliver TED talks , win international Toastmaster competitions or are just noteworthy people who have mastered the art of communication.

After each speaker’s opening line, I have added how you can include their style of opening into your own speech. Understanding how these great speakers do it will certainly give you an idea to create your own speech opening line which will grip the audience from the outset!

Alright! Let’s dive into the 15 powerful speech openings…

Note: Want to take your communications skills to the next level? Book a complimentary consultation with one of our expert communication coaches. We’ll look under the hood of your hurdles and pick two to three growth opportunities so you can speak with impact!

1. Ric Elias

Opening: “Imagine a big explosion as you climb through 3,000 ft. Imagine a plane full of smoke. Imagine an engine going clack, clack, clack. It sounds scary. Well I had a unique seat that day. I was sitting in 1D.”

How to use the power of imagination to open your speech?

Putting your audience in a state of imagination can work extremely well to captivate them for the remainder of your talk.

It really helps to bring your audience in a certain mood that preps them for what’s about to come next. Speakers have used this with high effectiveness by transporting their audience into an imaginary land to help prove their point.

When Ric Elias opened his speech, the detail he used (3000 ft, sound of the engine going clack-clack-clack) made me feel that I too was in the plane. He was trying to make the audience experience what he was feeling – and, at least in my opinion, he did.

When using the imagination opening for speeches, the key is – detail. While we want the audience to wander into imagination, we want them to wander off to the image that we want to create for them. So, detail out your scenario if you’re going to use this technique.

Make your audience feel like they too are in the same circumstance as you were when you were in that particular situation.

2. Barack Obama

Opening: “You can’t say it, but you know it’s true.”

3. Seth MacFarlane

Opening: “There’s nowhere I would rather be on a day like this than around all this electoral equipment.” (It was raining)

How to use humour to open your speech?

When you use humour in a manner that suits your personality, it can set you up for a great speech. Why? Because getting a laugh in the first 30 seconds or so is a great way to quickly get the audience to like you.

And when they like you, they are much more likely to listen to and believe in your ideas.

Obama effortlessly uses his opening line to entice laughter among the audience. He brilliantly used the setting (the context of Trump becoming President) and said a line that completely matched his style of speaking.

Saying a joke without really saying a joke and getting people to laugh requires you to be completely comfortable in your own skin. And that’s not easy for many people (me being one of them).

If the joke doesn’t land as expected, it could lead to a rocky start.

Keep in mind the following when attempting to deliver a funny introduction:

Know your audience: Make sure your audience gets the context of the joke (if it’s an inside joke among the members you’re speaking to, that’s even better!). You can read this article we wrote where we give you tips on how you can actually get to know your audience better to ensure maximum impact with your speech openings
The joke should suit your natural personality. Don’t make it look forced or it won’t elicit the desired response
Test the opening out on a few people who match your real audience. Analyze their response and tweak the joke accordingly if necessary
Starting your speech with humour means your setting the tone of your speech. It would make sense to have a few more jokes sprinkled around the rest of the speech as well as the audience might be expecting the same from you

4. Mohammed Qahtani

Opening: Puts a cigarette on his lips, lights a lighter, stops just before lighting the cigarette. Looks at audience, “What?”

5. Darren Tay

Opening: Puts a white pair of briefs over his pants.

How to use props to begin your speech?

The reason props work so well in a talk is because in most cases the audience is not expecting anything more than just talking. So when a speaker pulls out an object that is unusual, everyone’s attention goes right to it.

It makes you wonder why that prop is being used in this particular speech.

The key word here is unusual . To grip the audience’s attention at the beginning of the speech, the prop being used should be something that the audience would never expect. Otherwise, it just becomes something that is common. And common = boring!

What Mohammed Qahtani and Darren Tay did superbly well in their talks was that they used props that nobody expected them to.

By pulling out a cigarette and lighter or a white pair of underwear, the audience can’t help but be gripped by what the speaker is about to do next. And that makes for a powerful speech opening.

6. Simon Sinek

Opening: “How do you explain when things don’t go as we assume? Or better, how do you explain when others are able to achieve things that seem to defy all of the assumptions?”

7. Julian Treasure

Opening: “The human voice. It’s the instrument we all play. It’s the most powerful sound in the world. Probably the only one that can start a war or say “I love you.” And yet many people have the experience that when they speak people don’t listen to them. Why is that? How can we speak powerfully to make change in the world?”

How to use questions to open a speech?

I use this method often. Starting off with a question is the simplest way to start your speech in a manner that immediately engages the audience.

But we should keep our questions compelling as opposed to something that is fairly obvious.

I’ve heard many speakers start their speeches with questions like “How many of us want to be successful?”

No one is going to say ‘no’ to that and frankly, I just feel silly raising my hand at such questions.

Simon Sinek and Jullian Treasure used questions in a manner that really made the audience think and make them curious to find out what the answer to that question is.

What Jullian Treasure did even better was the use of a few statements which built up to his question. This made the question even more compelling and set the theme for what the rest of his talk would be about.

So think of what question you can ask in your speech that will:

Set the theme for the remainder of your speech
Not be something that is fairly obvious
Be compelling enough so that the audience will actually want to know what the answer to that question will be

8. Aaron Beverley

Opening: Long pause (after an absurdly long introduction of a 57-word speech title). “Be honest. You enjoyed that, didn’t you?”

How to use silence for speech openings?

The reason this speech opening stands out is because of the fact that the title itself is 57 words long. The audience was already hilariously intrigued by what was going to come next.

But what’s so gripping here is the way Aaron holds the crowd’s suspense by…doing nothing. For about 10 to 12 seconds he did nothing but stand and look at the audience. Everyone quietened down. He then broke this silence by a humorous remark that brought the audience laughing down again.

When going on to open your speech, besides focusing on building a killer opening sentence, how about just being silent?

It’s important to keep in mind that the point of having a strong opening is so that the audience’s attention is all on you and are intrigued enough to want to listen to the rest of your speech.

Silence is a great way to do that. When you get on the stage, just pause for a few seconds (about 3 to 5 seconds) and just look at the crowd. Let the audience and yourself settle in to the fact that the spotlight is now on you.

I can’t put my finger on it, but there is something about starting the speech off with a pure pause that just makes the beginning so much more powerful. It adds credibility to you as a speaker as well, making you look more comfortable and confident on stage.

If you want to know more about the power of pausing in public speaking , check out this post we wrote. It will give you a deeper insight into the importance of pausing and how you can harness it for your own speeches. You can also check out this video to know more about Pausing for Public Speaking:

9. Dan Pink

Opening: “I need to make a confession at the outset here. Little over 20 years ago, I did something that I regret. Something that I’m not particularly proud of. Something that in many ways I wish no one would ever know but that here I feel kind of obliged to reveal.”

10. Kelly McGonigal

Opening: “I have a confession to make. But first I want you to make a little confession to me.”

How to use a build-up to open your speech?

When there are so many amazing ways to start a speech and grip an audience from the outset, why would you ever choose to begin your speech with a ‘Good morning?’.

That’s what I love about build-ups. They set the mood for something awesome that’s about to come in that the audience will feel like they just have to know about.

Instead of starting a speech as it is, see if you can add some build-up to your beginning itself. For instance, in Kelly McGonigal’s speech, she could have started off with the question of stress itself (which she eventually moves on to in her speech). It’s not a bad way to start the speech.

But by adding the statement of “I have a confession to make” and then not revealing the confession for a little bit, the audience is gripped to know what she’s about to do next and find out what indeed is her confession.

11. Tim Urban

Opening: “So in college, I was a government major. Which means that I had to write a lot of papers. Now when a normal student writes a paper, they might spread the work out a little like this.”

12. Scott Dinsmore

Opening: “8 years ago, I got the worst career advice of my life.”

How to use storytelling as a speech opening?

“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.” Steve Jobs

Storytelling is the foundation of good speeches. Starting your speech with a story is a great way to grip the audience’s attention. It makes them yearn to want to know how the rest of the story is going to pan out.

Tim Urban starts off his speech with a story dating back to his college days. His use of slides is masterful and something we all can learn from. But while his story sounds simple, it does the job of intriguing the audience to want to know more.

As soon as I heard the opening lines, I thought to myself “If normal students write their paper in a certain manner, how does Tim write his papers?”

Combine such a simple yet intriguing opening with comedic slides, and you’ve got yourself a pretty gripping speech.

Scott Dismore’s statement has a similar impact. However, just a side note, Scott Dismore actually started his speech with “Wow, what an honour.”

I would advise to not start your talk with something such as that. It’s way too common and does not do the job an opening must, which is to grip your audience and set the tone for what’s coming.

13. Larry Smith

Opening: “I want to discuss with you this afternoon why you’re going to fail to have a great career.”

14. Jane McGonigal

Opening: “You will live 7.5 minutes longer than you would have otherwise, just because you watched this talk.”

How to use provocative statements to start your speech?

Making a provocative statement creates a keen desire among the audience to want to know more about what you have to say. It immediately brings everyone into attention.

Larry Smith did just that by making his opening statement surprising, lightly humorous, and above all – fearful. These elements lead to an opening statement which creates so much curiosity among the audience that they need to know how your speech pans out.

This one time, I remember seeing a speaker start a speech with, “Last week, my best friend committed suicide.” The entire crowd was gripped. Everyone could feel the tension in the room.

They were just waiting for the speaker to continue to know where this speech will go.

That’s what a hard-hitting statement does, it intrigues your audience so much that they can’t wait to hear more! Just a tip, if you do start off with a provocative, hard-hitting statement, make sure you pause for a moment after saying it.

Silence after an impactful statement will allow your message to really sink in with the audience.

Related article: 5 Ways to Grab Your Audience’s Attention When You’re Losing it!

15. Ramona J Smith

Opening: In a boxing stance, “Life would sometimes feel like a fight. The punches, jabs and hooks will come in the form of challenges, obstacles and failures. Yet if you stay in the ring and learn from those past fights, at the end of each round, you’ll be still standing.”

How to use your full body to grip the audience at the beginning of your speech?

In a talk, the audience is expecting you to do just that – talk. But when you enter the stage and start putting your full body into use in a way that the audience does not expect, it grabs their attention.

Body language is critical when it comes to public speaking. Hand gestures, stage movement, facial expressions are all things that need to be paid attention to while you’re speaking on stage. But that’s not I’m talking about here.

Here, I’m referring to a unique use of the body that grips the audience, like how Ramona did. By using her body to get into a boxing stance, imitating punches, jabs and hooks with her arms while talking – that’s what got the audience’s attention.

The reason I say this is so powerful is because if you take Ramona’s speech and remove the body usage from her opening, the entire magic of the opening falls flat.

While the content is definitely strong, without those movements, she would not have captured the audience’s attention as beautifully as she did with the use of her body.

So if you have a speech opening that seems slightly dull, see if you can add some body movement to it.

If your speech starts with a story of someone running, actually act out the running. If your speech starts with a story of someone reading, actually act out the reading.

It will make your speech opening that much more impactful.

Related article: 5 Body Language Tips to Command the Stage

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Final Words

So there it is! 15 speech openings from some of my favourite speeches. Hopefully, these will act as a guide for you to create your own opening which is super impactful and sets you off on the path to becoming a powerful public speaker!

But remember, while a speech opening is super important, it’s just part of an overall structure.

If you’re serious about not just creating a great speech opening but to improve your public speaking at an overall level, I would highly recommend you to check out this course: Acumen Presents: Chris Anderson on Public Speaking on Udemy. Not only does it have specific lectures on starting and ending a speech, but it also offers an in-depth guide into all the nuances of public speaking.

Being the founder of TED Talks, Chris Anderson provides numerous examples of the best TED speakers to give us a very practical way of overcoming stage fear and delivering a speech that people will remember. His course has helped me personally and I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking to learn public speaking.

No one is ever “done” learning public speaking. It’s a continuous process and you can always get better. Keep learning, keep conquering and keep being awesome!

Lastly, if you want to know how you should NOT open your speech, we’ve got a video for you:

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34 English Short Stories with Big Ideas for Thoughtful English Learners

What if you could understand big ideas in English with just a little bit of text?

You don’t need to read an entire English book to learn. A good English short story is often enough!

Stories are all about going beyond reality, and these classics will not only improve your English reading but also open your mind to different worlds.

1. “The Tortoise and the Hare” by Aesop

2. “the ant and the grasshopper” by aesop, 3. “white wing: the tale of the doves and the hunter”, 4. “royal servant”, 5. “emily’s secret”, 6. “the bogey beast” by flora annie steel, 7. “love is in the air”, 8. “the tale of johnny town-mouse” by beatrix potter, 9. “paul bunyan” adapted by george grow, 10. “cinderella” by charles perrault, 11. “little red riding hood” adapted by the british council, 12. “the lottery” by shirley jackson, 13. “the happy prince” by oscar wilde.

14. “The Night Train at Deoli” by Ruskin Bond

15. “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury

16. “Orientation” by Daniel Orozco

17. “Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu

18. “the missing mail” by r.k. narayan, 19. “harrison bergeron” by kurt vonnegut.

20. “The School” by Donald Barthelme

21. “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid

22. “rikki-tikki-tavi” by rudyard kipling, 23. excerpt from “little dorrit” by charles dickens, 24. “to build a fire” by jack london, 25. “miracles” by lucy corin.

26. “Evil Robot Monkey” by Mary Robinette Kowal

27. “The Boarded Window” by Ambrose Bierce

28. “the monkey’s paw” by w.w. jacobs, 29. “a tiny feast” by chris adrian, 30. “the story of an hour” by kate chopin, 31. “the zero meter diving team” by jim shepherd, 32. “the velveteen rabbit” by margery williams, 33. “the friday everything changed” by anne hart, 34. “hills like white elephants” by ernest hemingway, how to use short stories to improve your english, and one more thing....

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

This classic fable (story) is about a very slow tortoise (turtle) and a speedy hare (rabbit). The tortoise challenges the hare to a race. The hare laughs at the idea that a tortoise could run faster than him, but the race ends with a surprising result.

Have you ever heard the English expression, “Slow and steady wins the race”? This story is the basis for that common phrase . You can read it for free , along with a number of other stories in this list!

This is another great story that teaches a lesson that’s written for kids but adults can enjoy, too . The story tells of a grasshopper who lounges around all summer while his friend the ant prepares for the winter. When winter comes, the two friends end up in very different situations!

The moral is that those who save up during the good times will get to enjoy the benefits when times are bad.

White Wing The Tale of the Doves and the Hunter

This very short story from India was originally written in Sanskrit (an ancient language). When a group of doves is caught in a hunter’s net, they must work together as a team to escape from the hunter’s clutches.

You can listen to a reading of the story as you read along on this website.

In this story, an old man sets out to ask an African king to dig some wells in his village when their water runs dry. But first, he teaches the king a lesson in humility by showing him how all people help each other. Read the story to see how the clever old man gets the king to do as he asks!

This is a modern-day story about a little girl with a big secret she can’t tell anyone about. When her teacher finds out her secret, they work together to fix the issue.

This story is a good choice for absolute beginners, because it uses only the present tense. It’s also written in very basic English with simple vocabulary and short sentences.

The woman in this story finds a pot of treasure on her walk home. As she carries it home, the treasure keeps changing, becoming things of lesser value.

However, the woman’s enthusiasm makes her see only the positive after each change, which would have upset anyone else. Her positive personality tries to make every negative situation seem like a gift!

This story shows how important it is to look at things from a positive point of view. Instead of being disappointed in what we don’t have, this story reminds us to view what we do have as blessings.

This modern story is about a young woman named Penny who is anxious about going to her family’s annual reunion barbecue. But despite screaming children and arguing cousins, Penny ends up happy that she came to the reunion when she starts a conversation with a handsome man.

The story is written in simple English, using only the present tense, so it’s perfect for beginners.

The Tale of Johnny Town-mouse (Peter Rabbit)

This classic children’s story is about two mice, one from the country and one from the city. Both mice think that the other mouse is so lucky to live in what they think is a wonderful place!

The two mice decide to visit each other in their homes. It turns out that the country mouse has a difficult time in the city, and the city mouse struggles in the country.

In the end, they realize that they believed the old English saying: “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” In other words, each mouse thought the other had a better life, only to discover that they actually preferred their own life!

The story of Paul Bunyan has been around in the United States for many years. He’s the symbol of American frontier life, showing the ideal strength, work ethic and good morality that Americans work hard to imitate.

Paul Bunyan is considered a legend, so stories about him are full of unusual details, such as eating 50 eggs in one day and being so big that he caused an earthquake. It can be a pretty funny read, with characters such as a blue ox and a reversible dog.

This version of the story is also meant to be read out loud, so it’s fast-paced and entertaining. This website has an audio recording with the story, which you can play at slower or faster speeds.

You may already know the story of Cinderella, whether you saw the Disney movie or read a children’s book of it.

However, there are actually many different versions of “Cinderella.” This one by Charles Perrault is the most well-known and is often the version told to children.

“Cinderella” is a beloved story because it describes how a kind and hard-working person was able to get a happy ending. Even though Cinderella’s stepsisters treated her awfully, Cinderella herself remained gentle and humble. It goes to show that even though you may experience hardships, it’s important to stay kind, forgiving and mindful.

This is a story that every English-speaking child knows. It’s about a little girl who meets a wolf in the forest while going to see her sick grandmother. The wolf pretends to be her grandmother in order to trick the little girl.

This story is presented by the British Council as a video with the text clearly spoken. You can then play a game to rearrange the sentences below the video into the correct order, read the text of the story in a PDF file and answer some activity questions (then check your answers with the provided answer sheet.

This website has many other stories you can read and listen to, like “Circus Story” by Sue Clarke, which is an excellent option for learning animal vocabulary, and even adaptations of Shakespeare plays for younger readers.

The Lottery and Other Stories (FSG Classics)

Every year, the small town in this story holds an event known as “The Lottery.” During this event, someone from the community is randomly chosen.

What are they chosen for? You’ll have to read the story to find out.

You may have heard of the term “mob mentality” and how it can allow for some pretty surprising (and terrible) things to happen. This classic story looks at society, and how much evil people are willing to overlook to keep their society stable.

This is considered to be one of the most famous short stories in American literature. It’s a great example of what is known as a dystopian society, where people live in a frightening way. To learn more, check out this TED-Ed video that tells you how to recognize a dystopia.

Since the story is old, much of the English is outdated (not used in modern English). Still, if you have a good grasp of the English language, you can use this story to give yourself a great reading challenge.

14. “The Night Train at Deoli” by Ruskin Bond

Ruskin Bond used to spend summers at his grandmother’s house in Dehradun, India. While taking the train, he always had to pass through a small station called Deoli. No one used to get down at the station and nothing happened there.

Until one day, when he sees a girl selling fruit and is unable to forget her.

Ruskin Bond is a writer who can communicate deep feelings in a simple way. This story is about our attachment to strangers and why we cherish (value or appreciate deeply) them even though we might never meet them again.

The title is taken from a poem that describes how nature will continue its work long after humanity is gone. But in this story, we see that nature plays a supporting role and the machines are the ones who have taken its place.

They continue their work without any human or natural assistance. This shows how technology has replaced nature in our lives and how it can both destroy us and carry on without humanity itself.

16. “Orientation” by Daniel Orozco

This is a humorous story in which the speaker explains the office policies to a new employee while gossiping about the staff. It’s extremely easy to read, as the sentences are short and the vocabulary is simple.

Many working English learners will relate to this story, as it explains the silly, nonsensical moments of modern office life. Modern workplaces often feel like theaters where we pretend to work rather than get actual work done. The speaker exposes this reality that few would ever admit to.

He over-explains everything from the view out the office window to the intimate details of everyone’s life—from the overweight loner to the secret serial killer. It talks about the things that go unsaid; how people at the office know about the deep secrets of our home life, but don’t discuss them.

Jack’s mother can make paper animals come to life. In the beginning, Jack loves them and spends hours with his mom. But once he grows up, his mother’s inability to speak English keeps Jack from talking to her.

When his mother tries to talk to him through her creations, he kills them and collects them in a box. After a tragic loss, he finally gets to know her story through a hidden message that he should have read a long time ago.

The story is a simple narration that touches on complex issues, like leaving your home country and the conflicts that can occur within families when different cultures and languages collide.

Thanappa is the village mailman, who is good friends with Ramanujam and his family. He learns about a failed marriage and helps Ramanujam’s daughter get engaged to a suitable match.

Just before the wedding, Thanappa receives a tragic letter about Ramanujam’s brother. To spare them heartache, he decides not to deliver the letter.

The story explores the idea that despite the best of intentions, our actions can cause more harm to our loved ones than we ever intended. If you like this and want to read more by R.K. Narayan, check out the other stories in the author’s “ Malgudi Days” short story collection.

Harrison Bergeron in Welcome to the Monkey House

The year is 2081, and everyone has been made equal by force. Every person who is superior in any way has been handicapped (something that prevents a person’s full use of their abilities) by the government. Intelligent people are distracted by disturbing noises. Good dancers have to wear weights so that they don’t dance too well. Attractive people wear ugly masks so they don’t look better than anyone else.

However, one day there is a rebellion, and everything changes for a brief instant.

Technology is always supposed to make us better. But in this case, we see that it can be used to disable our talents. Moreover, the writer shows us how the mindless use of a single value like equality can create more suffering for everyone.

20. “The School” by Donald Barthelme

And that’s just the beginning of the series of unfortunate events at the school in this short story, narrated by a teacher. The story is absurd (ridiculous to the point of being silly), even though the topic is serious. By the end, the kids start asking difficult questions about death that the adults don’t quite know how to answer.

This story leaves a lot of things unsaid, which means you’ll need to “read between the lines,” or look closer at the text to understand what’s really happening.

In “Girl,” a mother tells her daughter how to live her life properly. The mother instructs the girl to do all the household chores, in very specific ways, making it seem like that’s her only duty in life.

Sometimes the mother tells the girl how to attract attention, not to talk to boys and to always keep away from men. Other times, the mother hints that the girl will need to be attractive to men to live a good life.

This story doesn’t feel like a story. There’s no plot, and nothing really happens. But read closely, and you’ll see an important message about how girls are taught to live restricted lives since childhood.

“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” is a classic tale about a Mongoose who regularly visits a family in India. The family feeds him and lets him explore their house, but they worry that he might bite their son, Teddy.

One day, when a snake is about to attack Teddy, the Mongoose kills it. This event helps the family accept the mongoose into their family.

This is a simple story about humans and animals living together as friends. It’s old, but the language is fairly easy to understand. It reminds us that animals can also experience feelings of love and, like humans, they will also protect the ones they love.

“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” is part of Kipling’s short story collection “The Jungle Book,” which was famously made into a movie by Disney.

Dorrit is a child whose father has been in prison ever since she could remember. Unable to pay their debts, the whole family is forced to spend their days in a cell. Dorrit dreams of seeing the world outside their little cell.

This excerpt (short part of a larger work) introduces you to the family and their life in prison. The novel is about how they manage to get out and how Dorrit never forgets the kindness of the people who helped her.

Injustice in law is often reserved for the poor. “Little Dorrit” shows the government jailing people for not being able to return their loans, a historical practice the writer hated since his own father was punished in a similar way.

To Build a Fire and Other Tales of the North

A man travels to a freezing, isolated place called Yukon with only his dog for company. Throughout his journey, he ignores the advice other people have given him and takes his life for granted.

Finally, he realizes the real power of nature and how fragile (easily broken) human life actually is.

Nature is often seen as a powerful force that should be feared and respected. The animal in this story is the one who’s cautious and sensible in this dangerous situation. By the end, readers wonder who is really intelligent—the man who could not deal with nature, or the dog who could survive?

This is a modern-day story that describes a group of children gathering around their father to watch little spiders hatch out of their eggs. But the story gets a different meaning as it nears the end. What do you think happened?

26. “Evil Robot Monkey ” by Mary Robinette Kowal

Sly is a character who doesn’t fit into society. He’s too smart for the other chimps, but humans don’t accept him. He is punished for acting out his natural emotions.

But the way he handles his rage, in the end, makes him look more mature than most human beings. Nominated for the Hugo award , many readers have connected with Sly since they can see similarities in their own lives.

“The Boarded Window” is a horror story about a man who has to deal with his wife’s death. The setting is a remote cabin in the wilderness in Cincinnati, and he feels helpless as she gets sick.

There’s an interesting twist to this story, and the ending will get you thinking (and maybe feeling a bit disturbed!).

If you enjoy older stories with a little suspense, this will be a good challenge for you. It talks about the event that made a hermit decide to live alone for decades, with a mysterious window boarded up in his cabin. It also uses a lot of psychology and symbolism, so you may want to read the story more than once to understand everything it has to say.

The Monkey's Paw and Other Tales of Mystery and the Macabre

Be careful what you wish for! One man finds this out the hard way when he brings a magical monkey’s paw home from India. This paw is supposed to grant three wishes to three people. People start to wish on it, only to realize that our wishes can have severe consequences.

The characters in this story immediately regret when their wishes come true. Even though they get what they wanted, it comes at a large cost!

This short story is from the early 1900s and uses some outdated English, but it’s still easy to follow. It reminds us that there are no shortcuts in life, and to be wary if something seems too good to be true.

This story centers around Titania and Oberon, two fairy characters from Shakespeare’s famous play, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The two fairies are having a rough time in their marriage when they find a human child. They decide to adopt him, hoping that he’ll help them save their relationship. However, the child develops a deadly, modern disease and the fairies have no idea what to do since they have never known illness or death.

This is a tragic tale about how they try to understand something they’ve never seen before and their deep love for a stranger who is so unlike them. The story explores the grief of parenthood and the uncertainty of knowing whether your child will ever even know you.

This story, written by a woman, is a sad look inside an unhappy marriage. Mrs. Mallard is a woman with heart troubles. When her husband dies, the people who come to give her this news tell it to her gently, so she doesn’t have a shock.

Mrs. Mallard busts into tears and locks herself in her room. At first, she’s upset by the news. But the more she considers it, the more excited she becomes about the idea of the freedom that would come from her husband’s death.

What happens, then, when her husband comes home after an hour, alive and well?

The story explores the conflicting range of the human emotions of grief and hope in a short span, and the impact it can have on a person’s mind and body.

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster was one of the deadliest accidents of the twentieth century. This is a story about that event seen through the eyes of a father and his sons, who were all unfortunate enough to be close to the disaster area.

The story exposes the whole system of corruption that led to a massive explosion taking innocent lives and poisoning multiple generations. The technical vocabulary and foreign words make this text a little more difficult. However, its plot is relatively easy to follow.

The story is divided into small parts that make it both easy and exciting to read. Its various events show what it was like to live in the former Soviet Union . And just like any other good story, it’s also about human relationships and how they change due to historic events.

A simple, stuffed rabbit toy is given to a young boy as a Christmas present. At first, the rabbit isn’t noticed, as the boy is distracted by much fancier gifts. While being ignored, the rabbit begins to wonder what it means to be “real.”

One day, a certain event brings the rabbit into contact with the boy, and changes the toy’s life forever.

Have you ever loved a toy or doll so much, that you treated it as if it were alive? This story shows the power of love from a very unexpected viewpoint: that of a fluffy stuffed rabbit. It also highlights the importance of self-value, being true to yourself and finding strength in those who love you.

Tradition is important in this school, where the boys always go to fetch water for the class. The girls are teased for being “weaker,” and are last to get other privileges, like having the first choice of magazines. One day, a girl asks the teacher why girls aren’t allowed to get the water, as well. This one question causes a big reaction and leads to a huge change.

The girl’s courage surprises everyone, but it also inspires other girls to stand up for themselves. One act from one brave person can lead to change and inspire others. The story reflects on gender equality and how important it is to fight for fairness. Just because something is accepted as “normal,” doesn’t mean it is right!

At a Spanish train station, an American man and a young woman wait for a train that would take them to the city of Madrid. The woman sees some faraway hills and compares them to “white elephants.” This starts a conversation between the two of them, but what they discuss seems to have a deeper meaning.

This is another very well-known story that asks you to “read between the lines” to find the hidden meaning behind the text. Much of the story is a back-and-forth dialogue between two people, but you can tell a lot about them just from what they say to each other.

There’s a lot of symbolism that you can analyze in this story, along with context clues. Once you realize what the real topic of the characters’ conversation is, you can figure out the quiet, sadder meaning behind it.

Short stories are effective in helping English learners to practice all four aspects of language learning: reading, writing, listening and speaking. Here’s how you can make the most out of short stories as an English learner:

Use illustrations to enhance your experience: Some short stories come with illustrations that you can use to guess what the story is about. You can even write your own caption or description of the picture. When you finish the story, go back to your image description. How did you do?
Explore stories related to a theme: Do you like ghost stories? Science fiction? Romance? If you’re learning about food or cooking, find a short story with a lot of food vocabulary .
Choose the right reading level: Make sure that you always challenge yourself! One easy way to tell if a story is just right for you is to use the “five-finger test.” Hold up your fist as you read a paragraph, and put up one finger for each word you don’t know. If you have all five fingers up before the end of the paragraph, try to find an easier text.
Practice “active reading”: Your reading will only help you learn if you read actively . You’re reading actively when you’re paying very close attention to the story, its words and its meanings. Writing with a notebook nearby and in a place with no distractions can help you focus on active reading.
Choose only a few words to look up: You may be tempted to stop at every unknown word, but it’s actually better to try to figure out its meaning from context clues. This means looking at everything else in the sentence or paragraph to try and guess the meaning of the word. Only look up words that you can’t figure out even with context clues.
Summarize the story: When you’ve finished reading the story, retell it in your own words or write a summary of it. This will help you to practice any new words you learned, and make sure that you understood the story well. If you’re struggling, read the story again and take notes as you read.
Take breaks: Just because these stories are short, doesn’t mean you need to read them in one sitting! If you find it hard to focus or you’re struggling to understand the story, take a break. It’s okay to read it one paragraph at a time.

I hope you have fun with these English short stories while improving your English language skills.

Happy reading!

If you like learning English through movies and online media, you should also check out FluentU. FluentU lets you learn English from popular talk shows, catchy music videos and funny commercials , as you can see here:

If you want to watch it, the FluentU app has probably got it.

The FluentU app and website makes it really easy to watch English videos. There are captions that are interactive. That means you can tap on any word to see an image, definition, and useful examples.

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FluentU lets you learn engaging content with world famous celebrities.

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FluentU lets you tap to look up any word.

Learn all the vocabulary in any video with quizzes. Swipe left or right to see more examples for the word you’re learning.

FluentU helps you learn fast with useful questions and multiple examples. Learn more.

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I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You

By Susan B. Glasser

Former U.S. President Donald Trump gives a speech in Rome Georgia in March 2024. Trump is photographed from above and is...

I’m sure you had better things to do on Saturday evening than watch Donald Trump rant for nearly two hours to an audience of cheering fans in Rome, Georgia. His speech was rambling, unhinged, vituperative, and oh-so-revealing. In his first rally since effectively clinching the Republican Presidential nomination, Trump made what amounted to his response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address . It’s hard to imagine a better or more pointed contrast with the vision that, two days earlier, the President had laid out for America.

And yet, like so much about Trump’s 2024 campaign, this insane oration was largely overlooked and under-covered, the flood of lies and B.S. seen as old news from a candidate whose greatest political success has been to acclimate a large swath of the population to his ever more dangerous alternate reality. No wonder Biden, trapped in a real world of real problems that defy easy solutions, is struggling to defeat him.

This is partly a category error. Though we persist in treating the 2024 election as a race between an incumbent and a challenger, it is not that so much as a contest between two incumbents: Biden, the actual President, and Trump, the forever-President of Red America’s fever dreams. But Trump, while he presents himself as the country’s rightful leader, gets nothing like the intense scrutiny for his speeches that is now focussed on the current occupant of the Oval Office. The norms and traditions that Trump is intent on smashing are, once again, benefitting him.

Consider the enormous buildup before, and wall-to-wall coverage of, Biden’s annual address to Congress. It was big news when the President called out his opponent in unusually scathing terms, referring thirteen times in his prepared text to “my predecessor” in what was, understandably, seen as a break with tradition. Republican commentators grumbled about the sharply partisan tone of the President’s remarks and the loud decibel in which he delivered them; Democrats essentially celebrated those same qualities.

Imagine if, instead, the two speeches had been covered side by side. Biden’s barbed references to Trump were all about the former President’s offenses to American democracy. He called out Trump’s 2024 campaign of “resentment, revenge, and retribution” and the “chaos” unleashed by the Trump-majority Supreme Court when it threw out the decades-old precedent of Roe v. Wade. In reference to a recent quote from the former President, in which Trump suggested that Americans should just “get over it” when it comes to gun violence, Biden retorted, “I say: Stop it, stop it, stop it!” His sharpest words for Trump came in response to the ex-President’s public invitation to Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that don’t spend what Trump wants them to on defense—a line that Biden condemned as “outrageous,” “dangerous,” and “unacceptable.”

Trump’s speech made little effort to draw substantive contrasts with Biden. Instead, the Washington Post counted nearly five dozen references to Biden in the course of the Georgia rally, almost all of them epithets drawn from the Trump marketing playbook for how to rip down an opponent—words like “angry,” “corrupt,” “crooked,” “flailing,” “incompetent,” “stupid,” and “weak.” Trump is, always and forever, a puerile bully, stuck perpetually on the fifth-grade playground. But the politics of personal insult has worked so well for Trump that he is, naturally, doubling down on it in 2024. In fact, one of the clips from Trump’s speech on Saturday which got the most coverage was his mockery of Biden’s stutter : a churlish—and, no doubt, premeditated—slur.

And yet there was the G.O.P. strategist Karl Rove, writing this week in the Wall Street Journal that it was Biden who had “lowered himself with shortsighted and counterproductive blows” in his State of the Union speech. Trump’s entire campaign is a study in grotesque slander, but Rove did not even mention Trump’s Georgia rally while sanctimoniously tut-tutting about Biden. And I don’t mean to single out Rove; it was hard to find any right-leaning commentators who did otherwise. This many years into the Trump phenomenon, they’ve figured out that the best way to deal with Trump’s excesses is simply to pretend they do not exist.

Hanging over both speeches was the increasingly burning question of performance, as the country is now forced to choose between two aging leaders aspiring to remain in the White House well into their eighties. Trump has arguably lowered the bar for Biden, with his constant insults aimed at the President’s age and capacity, and Biden managed to clear it, turning his State of the Union into an affirmation—for fretting Democratic partisans, at least—that he has the vigor and fight to keep going in the job.

Trump’s appearance in Georgia, by contrast, reflected a man not rooted in any kind of reality, one who struggled to remember his words and who was, by any definition, incoherent, disconnected, and frequently malicious. ( This video compilation , circulating on social media, nails it.) In one lengthy detour, he complained about Biden once being photographed on a beach in his bathing suit. Which led him to Cary Grant, which led him to Michael Jackson, which led him back to the point that even Cary Grant wouldn’t have looked good in a bathing suit at age eighty-one. In another aside, he bragged about how much “women love me,” citing as proof the “suburban housewives from North Carolina” who travel to his rallies around the country. He concluded that portion of his speech by saying:

But it was an amazing phenomenon and I do protect women. Look, they talk about suburban housewives. I believe I’m doing well—you know, the polls are all rigged. Of course lately they haven’t been rigged because I’m winning by so much, so I don’t want to say it. Disregard that statement. I love the polls very much.

Makes perfect sense, right?

It was no surprise, of course, that Trump began his speech by panning Biden’s: “the worst President in history, making the worst State of the Union speech in history,” an “angry, dark, hate-filled rant” that was “the most divisive, partisan, radical, and extreme” such address ever given. As always, what really stuns is Trump’s lack of self-awareness. Remember his “American carnage” address? Well, never mind. Get past the unintended irony, though, and what’s striking is how much of Trump’s 2024 campaign platform is being built on an edifice of lies, and not just the old, familiar lies about the “rigged election” which have figured prominently in every speech Trump has made since his defeat four years ago.

Trump’s over-the-top distortions of his record as President—“the greatest economy in history”; “the biggest tax cut in history”; “I did more for Black people than any President other than Abraham Lincoln”—are now joined by an equally flamboyant new set of untruths about Biden’s Presidency, which Trump portrayed in Saturday’s speech as a hellish time of almost fifty-per-cent inflation and an economy “collapsing into a cesspool of ruin,” with rampaging migrants being let loose from prisons around the world and allowed into the United States, on Biden’s orders, to murder and pillage and steal jobs from “native-born Americans.” Biden, in Trump’s current telling, is both a drooling incompetent being controlled by “fascists” and a corrupt criminal mastermind, “weaponizing” the U.S. government and its criminal-justice system to come after his opponent. His campaign slogan for 2024 might be summed up by one of the rally’s pithier lines: “Everything Joe Biden touches turns to shit. Everything.”

Indeed, Trump’s efforts this year to blame Biden for literally everything have taken on a baroque quality even by the modern-day standards of the party that introduced Willie Horton and Swift-boating into the political lexicon. Consider their latest cause célèbre, the tragic recent death of a young woman, Laken Riley, in which the accused is an undocumented migrant. Trump explicitly blamed Biden and his “crime-against-humanity” border policies for her death. “Laken Riley would be alive today,” he said, “if Joe Biden had not willfully and maliciously eviscerated the borders of the United States and set loose thousands and thousands of dangerous criminals into our country.” Against such treachery, Trump offers a simple, apocalyptic choice: doomsday if Biden is reëlected, or liberation from “these tyrants and villains once and for all.” Wars will be ended at the mere thought of Trump retaking power; crime will cease; arrests will be made; dissenters will be silenced.

I recognize that a speech such as the one that Trump delivered the other night is hard to distill into the essence required of a news story. His detours on Saturday included complaints about Jeff Zucker, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Martha Stewart, Megyn Kelly, “the big plagiarizer from Harvard,” Ron “DeSanctimonious,” the Washington Post , “Trump-deranged judge” Lewis Kaplan, “the fascist and racist attorney general of New York State,” “corrupt Fani Willis,” Merrick Garland, and the F.B.I., which, Trump claimed, “offers one million dollars to a writer of fiction about Donald Trump to lie and say it was fact where Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell was Russian disinformation.” What was he talking about? I don’t know. The man has so many grievances and so many enemies that it is, understandably, hard to keep them straight.

But whether or not it’s news in the conventional sense, it’s easiest to understand the threat that Trump poses to American democracy most clearly when you see it for yourself. Small clips of his craziness can be too easily dismissed as the background noise of our times. The condemnation of his critics, up to and including the current President, can sound shrill or simply partisan. The fact checks, while appalling, never stop the demagogue for whom the “bottomless Pinocchio” was invented.

On Tuesday, days after this performance, Trump and Biden each locked up their respective parties’ nominations. The general election has now begun, and Trump, as of this writing, is the favorite. In the next few months, the Biden campaign and its allies plan to spend close to a billion dollars attempting to persuade Americans not to make the historic mistake of electing Trump twice. My thought is a simpler and definitely cheaper one: watch his speeches. Share them widely. Don’t look away. ♦

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So Much for “Sleepy Joe”: On Biden’s Rowdy, Shouty State of the Union

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Is It Finally Donald Trump’s Time to Pay Up?

By Evan Osnos

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Amid Health Concerns, Pope Delivers Strong Easter Message Calling for Gaza Cease-Fire

Pope Francis’ decisions to reduce his participation in two major Holy Week events had raised fears about his health.

By Jason Horowitz

Reporting from Rome

Amid renewed concerns about his health, Pope Francis presided over Easter Sunday Mass, and with a hoarse but strong voice, he delivered a major annual message that touched on conflicts across the globe, with explicit appeals for peace in Israel, Gaza and Ukraine.

The appearance came after the pope decided to reduce his participation in two major Holy Week events, seemingly at the last minute.

Those decisions seemed to represent a new phase in a more than 11-year papacy throughout which Francis has made the acceptance of the limits that challenge and shape humanity a constant theme. Now, he seems to have entered a period in which he is himself scaling back to observe, and highlight, the limits imposed by his own health constraints, and to conserve strength for the most critical moments.

On Sunday after the Mass, Francis took a prolonged spin in his popemobile around St. Peter’s Square before ascending to a balcony overlooking it to deliver his traditional Easter message.

“Let us not allow the strengthening winds of war to blow on Europe and the Mediterranean,” he said to the tens of thousands of faithful, dignitaries, Swiss Guards and clergy filling the square.

Priests in white walk in pairs through arcs of yellow flowers.

Referring to the stone that had blocked the tomb of Jesus before his resurrection, which Easter celebrates, Francis said that “today, too, great stones, heavy stones, block the hopes of humanity.”

“The stone of war, the stone of humanitarian crises, the stone of human rights violations, the stone of human trafficking, and other stones as well,” he said.

The address was a compendium of Francis’ priorities, including the need to ease the suffering of people affected by war, natural disasters and famine in parts of the world he has himself visited. He addressed the plight of migrants, prayed for “consolation and hope” for the poor, and spoke against human trafficking and arms dealing.

But his focus, Francis said, was particularly turned toward the conflicts afflicting the world.

“My thoughts go especially to the victims of the many conflicts worldwide, beginning with those in Israel and Palestine, and in Ukraine,” he said, calling for the exchange of all prisoners between Russia and Ukraine.

“I appeal once again that access to humanitarian aid be ensured to Gaza, and call once more for the prompt release of the hostages seized on 7 October last and for an immediate cease-fire in the Strip,” he added.

Holy Week is one of the most demanding and significant on the Christian calendar, and Francis has been dogged all winter by what the Vatican has called the flu, bronchitis and cold-like symptoms. His doctor told the Italian news media on Saturday that Francis was in good shape for his age, but that flu season was difficult for him, as it was for many older people, partly because he had part of a lung removed as a young man.

In recent years, Francis’ health has declined. He had a significant portion of his large intestine removed in 2021, and last year he spent time in the hospital to remove potentially dangerous intestinal scar tissue from previous surgeries. Bad knee ligaments have often kept him to a wheelchair, and have required him to use a cane when he is on his feet.

Those ailments came to the fore last week when Francis skipped the homily , a sermon central to the Mass service, on Palm Sunday, and the traditional Good Friday procession at Rome’s Colosseum — an event he missed last year because he was recovering from bronchitis.

But this year, a chair for him had been placed on a platform outside the Colosseum, suggesting that the decision not to attend came at the last minute. The Vatican said Francis had made the decision “to conserve his health” in preparation for events on Saturday and Sunday.

Francis did preside over the Holy Thursday ritual of washing the feet of the faithful at a women’s prison in Rome. He appeared both purposeful and strong, talking with the inmates and giving a chocolate Easter egg to one of their sons. Then on Saturday evening, he presided over a long and solemn Easter Vigil in St. Peter’s Basilica.

On Sunday, Francis waved and seemed in good spirits as people shouted, “Long live the pope,” during his spin around St. Peter’s Square. He then re-emerged on the basilica’s balcony, lined with flowers, where he spoke about the toll that conflicts take on civilians.

In what amounted to a survey of the world’s often-forgotten conflicts, the pope spoke about the continuing suffering in Syria because of “a long and devastating war.” He expressed concern for Lebanese people affected by hostilities on their country’s border with Israel. He prayed for an end to the “violence, devastation and bloodshed” in Haiti, an easing of the humanitarian crisis afflicting the Rohingya ethnic minority persecuted in Myanmar, and an end to the suffering in Sudan and in the Sahel region of Africa.

And in Gaza, he said the eyes of suffering children ask: “Why? Why all this death?”

Jason Horowitz is the Rome bureau chief for The Times, covering Italy, the Vatican, Greece and other parts of Southern Europe. More about Jason Horowitz

Trump promotes Lee Greenwood's 'God Bless The USA Bible': What to know about the book and its long journey

Former president Donald Trump encourages supporters to buy Lee Greenwood's "God Bless The USA Bible," a project inspired by Nashville country musician's hit song.
Resurgent version of Greenwood's Bible project a modified version from original concept, a change that likely followed 2021 shake-up in publishers.

After years with few updates about Lee Greenwood’s controversial Bible, the project is again resurgent with a recent promotion by former President Donald Trump.

“All Americans need to have a Bible in their home and I have many. It’s my favorite book,” Trump said in a video posted to social media Tuesday, encouraging supporters to purchase the “God Bless The USA Bible.” “Religion is so important and so missing, but it’s going to come back.”

Greenwood — the Nashville area country musician whose hit song “God Bless the USA” inspired the Bible with a similar namesake — has long been allies with Trump and other prominent Republicans, many of whom are featured in promotional material for the “God Bless The USA Bible.” But that reputational clout in conservative circles hasn’t necessarily translated to business success in the past, largely due to a major change in the book’s publishing plan.

Here's what to know about the Bible project’s journey so far and why it’s significant it’s back in the conservative limelight.

An unordinary Bible, a fiery debate

The “God Bless The USA Bible” received heightened attention since the outset due to its overt political features.

The text includes the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, Pledge of Allegiance, and the lyrics to the chorus to Greenwood’s “God Bless The USA.” Critics saw it as a symbol of Christian nationalism, a right-wing movement that believes the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation.

A petition emerged in 2021 calling Greenwood’s Bible “a toxic mix that will exacerbate the challenges to American evangelicalism.” From there, a broader conversation ensued about the standards by which publishers print Bibles.

Gatekeeping in Bible publishing

Greenwood’s early business partner on the project, a Hermitage-based marketing firm called Elite Source Pro, initially reached a manufacturing agreement with the Nashville-based HarperCollins Christian Publishing to print the “God Bless The USA Bible.”

As part of that agreement, HarperCollins would publish the book but not sell or endorse it. But then HarperCollins reversed course , a major setback for Greenwood’s Bible.

The reversal by HarperCollins followed a decision by Zondervan — a publishing group under HarperCollins Christian Publishing and an official North American licensor for Bibles printed in the New International Version translation — to pass on the project. HarperCollins said the decision was unrelated to the petition or other public denunciations against Greenwood’s Bible.

The full backstory: Lee Greenwood's 'God Bless the USA Bible' finds new printer after HarperCollins Christian passes

A new translation and mystery publisher

The resurgent “God Bless The USA Bible” featured in Trump’s recent ad is an altered version of the original concept, a modification that likely followed the publishing shake-up.

Greenwood’s Bible is now printed in the King James Version, a different translation from the original pitch to HarperCollins.

Perhaps the biggest mystery is the new publisher. That manufacturer is producing a limited quantity of copies, leading to a delayed four-to-six weeks for a copy to ship.

It’s also unclear which business partners are still involved in the project. Hugh Kirkman, who led Elite Service Pro, the firm that originally partnered with Greenwood for the project, responded to a request for comment by referring media inquiries to Greenwood’s publicist.

The publicist said Elite Source Pro is not a partner on the project and the Bible has always been printed in the King James Version.

"Several years ago, the Bible was going to be printed with the NIV translation, but something happened with the then licensor and the then potential publisher. As a result, this God Bless The USA Bible has always been printed with the King James Version translation," publicist Jeremy Westby said in a statement.

Westby did not have the name of the new licensee who is manufacturing the Bible.

Trump’s plug for the “God Bless The USA Bible” recycled language the former president is using to appeal to a conservative Christian base.

“Our founding fathers did a tremendous thing when they built America on Judeo-Christian values,” Trump said in his video on social media. “Now that foundation is under attack perhaps as never before.”

'Bring back our religion’: Trump vows to support Christians during Nashville speech

Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean. Reach him at [email protected] or on social media @liamsadams.

Pope’s Easter speech renews calls for peace in Gaza, Ukraine

ROME — Speaking to tens of thousands of followers in St. Peter’s Square, and millions more across the globe, Pope Francis gave a solemn accounting of a world in crisis Sunday, using the pulpit of his Easter address to renew calls for a cease-fire in Gaza while drawing attention to other conflicts, from Ukraine to Haiti, heightened risks of famine, the threat of climate change and the plight of migrants.

The pope’s Easter address, known as an Urbi et Orbi — or a speech “to the city [of Rome] and the world” — doesn’t often make news but is, along with the speech delivered at Christmas, one of the most important on the papal calendar. His words served to crystallize the ills plaguing a fragile, violent world and found the pontiff of 1.3 billion Catholics fulfilling a role he frequently assumes: humanity’s conscience and moral compass.

Surrounded by the splendor of the Vatican and 35,000 blooms supplied by Dutch florists, Francis appeared steady if occasionally labored while speaking, after skipping or reducing his participation in several events during Holy Week leading up to Easter. The week is considered among the most physically taxing for the 87-year-old and came this year as concerns have mounted about his health.

Following an Easter service marked by pageantry and tradition and celebrated with the aid of a cardinal, however, Francis appeared animated, even jocular, as he shook hands with senior clerics from his wheelchair. He later took to his popemobile to wave at ecstatic worshipers, some of whom yelled out: “Long live the pope!”

In his subsequent speech from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica — where, on a blustery day, his white mantilla lifted up behind him at times — Francis delved into the two conflicts about which his comments have stirred the most controversy: Ukraine and Gaza.

He said his thoughts went out to “Israel and Palestine” and appealed once more for a cease-fire and guarantees for humanitarian aid in Gaza. On Sunday, without mentioning Hamas by name, he called for the Israeli hostages kidnapped by the group on Oct. 7 to be released. He also drew attention to the plight of Lebanon , home to a large Christian population.

Francis has previously drawn the ire of Israel for comments suggesting that its assault on the Gaza Strip is tantamount to “terrorism.”

“Let us not allow the current hostilities to continue to have grave repercussions on the civil population, by now at the limit of its endurance, and above all on the children,” Francis said Sunday. “How much suffering we see in the eyes of the children: The children in those lands at war have forgotten how to smile! With those eyes, they ask us: Why? Why all this death? Why all this destruction?”

In Ukraine, the pope has drawn sharp criticism for his suggestion that Russia was provoked into action by NATO. This month, in an interview with Swiss public broadcaster RSI, he picked up on a word used by his interviewer to suggest there was strength in raising a “white flag” by those who are “defeated.”

On Sunday, the pope called for a prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine and for an end to hostilities.

He spun a picture of a world in crisis, expressing grief for the violence in Haiti , the plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar and strife in Africa. He warned of returning ethnic tensions in the western Balkans. “May ethnic, cultural and confessional differences not be a cause of division, but rather a source of enrichment for all of Europe and for the world as a whole,” he said.

The pope’s mobility is restricted by knee pain, and he underwent intestinal surgery last year . But in recent months, the Vatican has said his primary issue has been respiratory . He repeatedly skipped events and handed speeches over to aides amid lingering bouts with bronchitis and influenza. Last month, as he fought a flu, he made an unannounced visit to a Rome hospital for diagnostic tests.

On Palm Sunday — a week before Easter — millions around the globe watched as Francis, at the last minute, decided to forgo delivery of his homily.

At Wednesday’s regular papal audience, he appeared in good spirits and relatively strong, walking with only the aid of a cane onto the stage at the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall.

Two days later, however, he refrained from an act of humility he has performed in the past: prostrating himself on the floor of St. Peter’s Basilica during Good Friday’s Passion of the Lord service. And he skipped a reenactment of the crucifixion of Jesus at Rome’s Colosseum. The Vatican said the intention was to preserve his strength ahead of a busy week of Easter engagements. On Saturday night, he presided over an Easter Vigil at St. Peter’s Basilica, pushed inside in his wheelchair and sounding slightly strained and sometimes out of breath.

During Easter week, Francis has also sought to focus on women and renew his dedication to a cornerstone of his papacy: humility. After his ascension to the throne of St. Peter in 2013, he revolutionized the traditional washing of feet — a nod to the Christian belief that Jesus washed the feet of his 12 disciples the night before his crucifixion — by including women, refugees and Muslims. On Holy Thursday this year, he opted to visit Rome’s Rebibbia prison and, for the first time, exclusively washed the feet of women, all of them inmates, from his wheelchair .

The pope’s health struggles have fueled talk of whether he might follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, by retiring. In his recently published autobiography , however, the pope suggested that his condition would need to be extremely grave to take such a step. Referring to chatter among his critics, he wrote: “Some people may have hoped that sooner or later, perhaps after a stay in the hospital, I might make an announcement of that kind, but there is no risk of it.”

Pope’s Easter speech renews calls for peace in Gaza, Ukraine

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Judge dismisses Elon Musk's suit against hate speech researchers

Bobby Allyn

Elon Musk, owner of X, sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate after the group published a series of reports detailing an uptick of hate speech on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Czarek Sokolowski/AP hide caption

A federal judge has dismissed X owner Elon Musk's lawsuit against a research group that documented an uptick in hate speech on the social media site, saying the organization's reports on the platform formerly known as Twitter were protected by the First Amendment.

Musk's suit, "is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose," wrote U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in his Monday ruling, "This case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech."

Amid an advertiser boycott of X last year, Musk sued the research and advocacy organization Center for Countering Digital Hate, alleging it violated the social media site's terms of service in gathering data for its reports.

One of the group's findings, published in June, detailed how "racist, homophobic, neo-Nazi, antisemitic or conspiracy content" from paid users went unmoderated on the site.

During a February hearing, lawyers for Musk asked if the suit could be refiled against the research group, but Breyer declined that request. The judge said claiming the alleged data scraping was harming the platform's safety and security does not "make very much sense."

Judge is skeptical of Musk's claims

Researchers with the center say data was compiled using third-party tools that accessed publicly available information, but Musk contended that the group scraped large amounts of data from X without the company's permission, leading to a loss of advertising revenue in the tens of millions of dollars.

Judge skeptical of lawsuit brought by Elon Musk's X over hate speech research

In a February hearing, Breyer appeared highly skeptical of X's arguments. He elaborated on those doubts in his Monday order tossing the suit.

"It is also just not true that the complaint is only about data collection," the judge wrote. "It is impossible to read the complaint and not conclude that X Corp. is far more concerned about CCDH's speech than it is its data collection methods."

Musk, a self-professed free speech absolutist, often says that nearly anything within the bounds of law should be allowed on X. However, Musk himself has been less tolerant of comments and remarks that cast him in a harsh light.

In November, Musk sued another group, the left-leaning nonprofit Media Matters for America, over reports that documented how advertisements from major corporations were appearing alongside antisemitic content on X. The suit, which is still pending, calls the group's reports "a blatant smear campaign."

Musk did not return a request for comment on the Monday ruling, but in an email last month following a hearing in the case, Musk wrote: "Your org is not on X, therefore doesn't exist as far as I'm concerned," referring to NPR's decision last year to leave the platform.

Since the center won under California's so-called anti-SLAPP laws — which protect people and groups from frivolous lawsuits aimed at suppressing free speech — Musk will be on the hook to pay the group's legal fees.

"The specific amount of fees will need to be hashed out in court," said Ben Weich, spokesman for the group.

Musk has brought back previously suspended users to X

In 2022, after Musk purchased Twitter, he suspended the accounts of several journalists who covered Musk's takeover of the site, before reinstating them after a backlash.

Imran Ahmed, the founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, views Musk's suit as the billionaire's latest effort to silence criticism over how he is running the social media site.

"We hope this landmark ruling will embolden public-interest researchers everywhere to continue, and even intensify, their vital work of holding social media companies accountable for the hate and disinformation they host and the harm they cause," Ahmed said.

Since Musk completed his takeover of Twitter in October 2022, he has laid off a majority of its staff and brought back users who were suspended for things like espousing white supremacy and denying the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

He also turned the platform's verification system upside down by allowing users to pay for the once-coveted blue check mark.

Users of X who pay for Musk's premium service, some of them previously kicked off Twitter, have the ability to write longer posts and receive boosted visibility.

Musk has been inconsistent about the state of X's business.

At times, he says the business is strong, but other times, he points to advertising revenue being down 60% and floats the possibility of the company entering bankruptcy proceedings.

Trump seeks to dismiss Georgia charges claiming free speech

ATLANTA — An attorney for Donald Trump pressed the judge overseeing the Georgia election interference case to dismiss charges against the former president, arguing that Trump’s statements challenging the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, even if they were false, were protected political speech under the First Amendment.

In a Thursday court hearing, Steve Sadow, an attorney for Trump, argued his client’s claims “calling into question” his 2020 loss should not be criminalized because they were “core value, political discourse” that is constitutionally protected free speech even if it is found to be untrue.

“There is nothing alleged factually against President Trump that is not political speech,” Sadow argued. “Take out the political speech. No criminal charges.”

Sadow suggested that Trump had been charged in Georgia because prosecutors believed the former president’s statements were untrue. But he told Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee , who is presiding over the case, that even false statements made in campaign or election statements are still protected speech under the First Amendment.

“The mere fact that it’s false is all that they have,” Sadow said.

Fulton County prosecutors vigorously disagreed, accusing Trump’s lawyer of trying to recast the charges against Trump, who they claim was squarely at the center of a sweeping criminal conspiracy to reverse his loss in Georgia in 2020.

“It’s not just that he lied over and over and over again,” prosecutor Donald Wakeford said. “What we have heard today is an attempt to rewrite the indictment, to take out parts that are inconvenient, and say, ‘Well, it’s all speech. It’s all talking.’ He was just a guy asking questions and not someone who was part of an overarching criminal conspiracy trying to overturn election results for an election he did not win.”

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Trump’s false statements about the election in Georgia were central to the alleged conspiracy, Wakeford added. “It’s not that the defendant has been hauled into a courtroom because the prosecution doesn’t like what he said. … He’s being prosecuted for lying to the government.”

McAfee did not rule on Trump’s motion to dismiss or give any timetable for a decision. It was the first court hearing since McAfee ruled two weeks ago that Fulton Country District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) and her office could stay on the case after Trump and other defendants sought to disqualify her over a romantic relationship she had with an outside attorney she appointed to lead the prosecution.

But in a March 15 filing , McAfee did find a “significant appearance of impropriety” and ruled that either Willis and her office or special prosecutor Nathan Wade had to leave the case. Wade resigned later that day.

Last week, McAfee granted a “ certificate of immediate review ” allowing Trump and the others to appeal his ruling to the Georgia Court of Appeals. That filing is expected in coming days — though McAfee, in granting the motion, said the case will continue to move forward.

Thursday’s hearing was expected to be the first of several motion hearings in coming weeks to tackle a backlog of pretrial motions — including the looming question of a potential trial date and if McAfee divides up the defendants into different trials.

There was a noticeably different atmosphere in the courtroom Thursday compared with recent proceedings, when the motion to disqualify Willis prompted tense interactions between attorneys on both sides. In recent months, the prosecution team took back hallways and private elevators en route to McAfee’s courtroom to avoid the media. But on Thursday, prosecutors walked through the regular entrance to the courtroom several minutes early, where they spoke with Sadow and other attorneys, exchanging pleasantries.

No replacement has been named for Wade, and a spokesman for Willis declined to comment. But Daysha Young, an executive district attorney and member of the prosecution team, responded to McAfee when the judge asked for comments outside the motions being argued Thursday.

Sadow’s political speech arguments on Thursday closely followed those raised by Trump’s attorneys in the federal election interference case. At one point, Wakeford noted “the elephant in this courtroom” by mentioning U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan , who is presiding over that case, had denied Trump’s motion challenging that indictment on First Amendment grounds.

“The First Amendment does not protect speech that is used as an instrument of a crime,” Chutkan wrote in a Dec. 1 order.

More on the Trump Georgia case

The latest: Nathan Wade, the lead prosecutor in the Georgia election interference case against former president Donald Trump and his allies, resigned hours after the judge ruled that Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) may continue with the prosecution , but only if Wade, whom Willis had a romantic relationship with, exited the case. Read the full decision from Judge Scott McAfee .

Status of the case: Trump and his associates are accused of conspiring to try to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia . Four of Trump’s co-defendants have pleaded guilty in the Georgia election case. Trump previously entered a plea of not guilty . The case does not have a scheduled trial date.

The charges: The judge dismissed six counts in the sweeping 41-count criminal racketeering indictment. Here’s a breakdown of the original charges against Trump and a list of everyone else who was charged in the Georgia case . Trump now faces 88 felony charges in four criminal cases.

Historic mug shot: Trump was booked at the Fulton County Jail on charges that he illegally conspired to overturn his 2020 election loss . Authorities released his booking record — including his height and weight — and mug shot .

Judge grants Trump request to appeal decision to keep Fani Willis on Georgia case March 20, 2024 Judge grants Trump request to appeal decision to keep Fani Willis on Georgia case March 20, 2024
How a sleuth defense attorney and a disgruntled law partner damaged the Trump Georgia case March 16, 2024 How a sleuth defense attorney and a disgruntled law partner damaged the Trump Georgia case March 16, 2024
Fani Willis can stay on Trump Georgia case, judge rules, as Wade resigns March 15, 2024 Fani Willis can stay on Trump Georgia case, judge rules, as Wade resigns March 15, 2024

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FREE 35+ Speech Examples in PDF
You know that telling stories in speeches makes them compelling to
how to properly write speech in a story
FREE 35+ Speech Examples in PDF
😍 Famous narrative speeches. 5 of the Best Speech opening lines. 2019-03-03
Identify parts of speech in this story

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Examples of narrative speech topics
125 examples of narrative speech topics: - 40 'first' experiences, - 40 tell-a-story topics, - 35 personal story ideas. How to best use this page. Choosing the right narrative speech topic. How to get from topic to speech (with a printable speech outline to download) A definition of the word 'narrative'. A personal story is a powerful story.
The Power of Story: The Secret Ingredient to Making Any Speech
Stories Help the Audience Become Emotionally Engaged. "Emotions are the condiments of speech," according to speech coach Nancy Duarte. They add spice and flavor to your talk. Emotions such as passion, vulnerability, excitement, and fear are particularly powerful.
The 5 Steps of Storytelling
The biggest public speaking secret that I know is that you can do the exact same thing in your speeches. When you share stories of your successes, your audience lives vicariously through your stories. I remember growing up hearing the phrase, "Experience is the best teacher." After being a business owner for 20 plus years now, I realize how ...
Resource 9: Storytelling Speech Template
The following template can be used in more formal storytelling situations, where you are telling a story uninterrupted for an audience, often as a portion of a speech. As with any template, you might not need this tool; in fact, if it interferes with you being authentic, please disregard! That said, if it helps you get unstuck or get the ideas ...
How to tell a captivating story
7. Before you deliver the story, practice, practice and practice again - but don't memorize it. It's natural to feel nerves before sharing a story aloud. Become very familiar with your story ...
How to Start a Storytelling Speech
Here are three perfect tips for starting a storytelling speech that will put your audience on the edge of their seats. 1. Start with a personal story. One of the most effective ways to immediately captivate your audience is by starting with a personal story. Sharing a personal experience or anecdote helps create a connection with your audience.
How to tell powerful stories in your speeches
After the Quest, the other fundamental stories are: Stranger in a Strange Land, Love Story, Rags to Riches, and Revenge. The way to think about these stories is as thematic ideas that you invoke as you go through your speech. You might do it with a specific reference to a particular, well-known Quest story, like the Holy Grail, the Wizard of Oz ...
9 Storytelling Approaches For Your Next Speech or Presentation
Evokes a sense of empathy in them. Deciphers the importance of learning new lessons and gaining wisdom. Finally, your audience sees the value of your product or service. 2. Rags to Riches. We all love listening to success stories, especially when the protagonist has struggled from the depth of despair.
Structure Your Presentation Like a Story
Structure Your Presentation Like a Story. by. Nancy Duarte. October 31, 2012. PM Images/Getty Images. After studying hundreds of speeches, I've found that the most effective presenters use the ...
17 Storytelling Ideas to Breathe Life Into Every Speech
Idea Number 6: Use character dialogue (with a quick narration set-up) in order to shorten your stories and pump life into them. There's far too much narration in many stories. Dialogue will shorten your stories. Idea Number 7: Don't just establish a conflict, escalate it. Idea Number 8: Don't be the Guru of your own story.
"The Danger of a Single Story" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speech
Speech Transcript. I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the danger of the single story.". I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth.
The Art of Storytelling in Speeches
The power of storytelling lies in its ability to captivate an audience's attention. Stories create a connection by drawing the listener into the narrative. They evoke empathy, curiosity, and a sense of shared experience. ‍ The impact on the speaker's credibility. When a speaker weaves compelling stories into their speech, it enhances their ...
Writing and Delivering Spectacular Short Speeches (A-Z guide)
Stories are one of the best ways to get the audience engaged. In short speeches, stories can be used to explain a concept. You can structure your speech in a way that conveys a story as well. Delivery of an Impromptu Speech. While delivering impromptu speeches, you might not have enough time to spare and structure the information in a ...
8 Opening a Speech: Get Their Attention from the Start!
Story Capturing the audience through the story is one of the most powerful ways to start a speech. A story engages the brain in powerful ways and causes the audience's brains to sync with the speakers. A well-told story will allow the audience to "see" things in their mind's eye and to join the speaker's emotions.
The Anatomy of a Story
In Toastmasters, we weave stories—funny, somber, insightful, relatable—into our speeches for the same purpose: to persuade, inform, influence, or inspire. The impact of a story begins in its bones—the basic structure that supports many varied narratives, such as the rags-to-riches story arc.
Short Anecdotes for Speeches and Parables to Amaze Your Audience
When You Use an Anecdote in a Speech, Tie the Story to the Greater Meaning of Your Presentation. The anecdotes themselves add entertainment and humor to a speech. But when you use the story to relay a greater message, they almost have a magic quality. When you tell an anecdote in a speech, spend time at the end tying the incident back to the ...
How to Start a Speech with a Story
Reduce it to a sentence or a phrase. Then brainstorm stories that talk about or imply that singular point. Make the segue to your content. And come back and end the way you started. As I was helping lead this discussion by using some examples from our group, I had one of those sky-parting-angels-singing moments.
How to Format Dialogue in Your Novel or Short Story
1. Use Quotation Marks to Indicate Spoken Word. Whenever someone is speaking, their words should be enclosed in double quotation marks. Example: "Let's go to the beach.". 2. Dialogue Tags Stay Outside the Quotation Marks. Dialogue tags attribute a line of dialogue to one of the characters so that the reader knows who is speaking.
15 Powerful Speech Opening Lines (And How to Create Your Own)
Analyze their response and tweak the joke accordingly if necessary. Starting your speech with humour means your setting the tone of your speech. It would make sense to have a few more jokes sprinkled around the rest of the speech as well as the audience might be expecting the same from you. 4. Mohammed Qahtani.
34 English Short Stories with Big Ideas for Thoughtful ...
The story exposes the whole system of corruption that led to a massive explosion taking innocent lives and poisoning multiple generations. The technical vocabulary and foreign words make this text a little more difficult. However, its plot is relatively easy to follow. The story is divided into small parts that make it both easy and exciting to ...
I Listened to Trump's Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally
I'm sure you had better things to do on Saturday evening than watch Donald Trump rant for nearly two hours to an audience of cheering fans in Rome, Georgia. His speech was rambling, unhinged ...
Pope Francis, in Easter Message, Calls for Gaza Cease-Fire
Amid renewed concerns about his health, Pope Francis presided over Easter Sunday Mass, and with a hoarse but strong voice, he delivered a major annual message that touched on conflicts across the ...
Trump Bible: Journey behind Lee Greenwood's 'God Bless the USA Bible'
A petition emerged in 2021 calling Greenwood's Bible "a toxic mix that will exacerbate the challenges to American evangelicalism." From there, a broader conversation ensued about the ...
Pope's Easter speech renews calls for peace in Gaza, Ukraine
Story by Anthony Faiola • 9h. ROME — Speaking to tens of thousands of followers in St. Peter's Square, and millions more across the globe, Pope Francis gave a solemn accounting of a world in ...
Federal judge tosses Elon Musk's case against hate speech ...
A federal judge on Monday threw out a lawsuit by Elon Musk's X that had targeted a watchdog group for its critical reports about hate speech on the social media platform. In a blistering 52-page ...
Judge dismisses Elon Musk's suit against hate speech researchers
A federal judge has dismissed X owner Elon Musk's lawsuit against a research group that documented an uptick in hate speech on the social media site, saying the organization's reports on the ...
Trump seeks to dismiss Georgia charges claiming free speech
ATLANTA — An attorney for Donald Trump pressed the judge overseeing the Georgia election interference case to dismiss charges against the former president, arguing that Trump's statements ...