The lure of a good story has run through human history. Before the writing system was developed, sagas were handed down from one generation of storytellers to another; in the modern society of lush education resources, fables play a vital role in teaching preschool kids to tell right from wrong. But when it comes to delivering a research presentation, especially as scholars in academia, we tend to focus too much on the words we say—as if it were a paper that we only needed to read out loud; and too little on telling a good story, one that flows, with the turns and rhythms dictating where it begins and ends.
I am by no means a presentation master, not even a tolerable one; more often than not, I find myself too nervous to look into the listens’ eyes, speak too fast, try to deliver too much content within the time limit, or end up leaving the audience baffled and unable to catch the focus of the talk due to my flat intonation. Therefore, I decided to work on my public speaking and presentation skills. Confidence, clarity, engagement…, a public presentation is measured in various aspects, which I am still learning. Here, I discuss what I understand only concerning storytelling.
Concretely, when delivering an academic presentation, to tell a good story means if each slide is a dot, then connecting those dots forms a complete plot with a background, rising tension, falling and conclusion. For example, of the talk I delivered at my aptitude colloquium, the story flowed as in this flow chart from top to bottom.
The connecting dots in my account were:
- Started with an example e.g.1, and throw a question.
- Introduce the mechanism generating e.g.1, answer the question in 1.
- E.g.1 triggered my research question, which is ‘’ …’’. Two key concepts in my question: A and B.
- We know how B -> binary A
- But how B -> general A is unknown.
- I use C to study general A.
- Then I look at B -> C.
- Therefore I got to know B -> general A. Problem solved.
A common practise is to use the Introduction-Problem Formulation-Methods-Results-Conclusion template. I do not recommend this template at all. It is both tedious and breaks the flow of the story.
The storytelling mindset not only helps to structure an engaging public talk, but on a smaller scale, adding personal stories to a talk helps significantly to keep the audience attracted, receive their empathy and pass the messages. I learned this lesson at a Toastmasters event, where I delivered an impromptu speech on the given line ‘’Enlarge your house, enrich your life’’. The message I wanted to pass to the audience of the night was a metaphor that the human body is a house, and one can enlarge the space of this house by regularly practising yoga. Imagine if I had abruptly thrown my argument at the audience, I don’t think they would have empathized with me. Instead, I started by telling why I started yoga practice, how my view of yoga had developed over the years, and the instructor who told me this metaphor, before I finally spoke out the argument. I believe it was the personal experiences that called on the audience; as a result, they accepted my final argument, whatever it was, very naturally. Take another example in the academic setting. Instead of analyzing the 1st, 2nd, 3rd disadvantages of some hardware with a whole slide of bullet points, one can simply tell a story of, say, how laboursome it was to carry the hardware piece from the lab to the field. Then, all the disadvantages flow out and pass naturally to the audience.
A great public speech consists of many factors: confidence, clarity, engagement etc.. Through practise, mainly failures, I have learned the great power of storytelling. Just as I learned to code, to do research, to write, I hope one day I can also learn to give excellent public speeches.