Why Stories?
You might have wondered why we are taking a narrative focus in this public speaking
course. Isn’t narrative something reserved for English classes? How are stories going to
help you build an argument? How are stories going to help you construct and deliver a
lesson plan? How are stories going to help you change public policy? These are important
questions to ask of the relationship narrative shares with public speaking, and is our hope
this quarter to resolve these questions.
We are exposed to narratives constantly. At their most basic level, narratives are ways of
making sense of an event or an experience. In fact, humanity’s tendency to narrativize
experience moved rhetoric scholar Walter Fisher (1984) to rename humans homo narrans
to reflect our innate ability to construct and understand stories. They enter our lives
through political commentary, sitcoms, movies, gossip shared between friends, video
games, and this list could go on and on. Let’s think back to the recent debt-ceiling/deficit
crisis that faced Congress and President Obama during the mid-late summer of 2011.
Depending on which political party (or not at all), you probably had a way of describing
how the nation should resolve the situation. Republicans spun the tale that the crisis
needed to be handled without imposing taxes, and Democrats spun the tale that taxes
needed to be raised on the rich. (And lets not the forget the countless Americans who
began weaving the narrative that Congress is completely inept!)
But why this is relevant to public speaking has yet to be addressed.
What narrative offers public speaking is a way of speaking to broad social issues through
the embodied experiences of those who live the issues on a daily basis. Typically, a
narrative approach to public speaking will feature the lived-experience of one person in
order to drive home the point you are making about your specific topic. For example, if you
were to construct a speech about the rising costs of higher education, you would focus on
one student who you feel is experiencing the financial stress more than others. You would
position this person as the main character of your speech and use his/her story of financial
hardship with regard to higher education to inform your audience about rising university
costs. In other words, through narrative you have the ability to put a face on a social issue.
But this approach to public speaking does raise a very important question: What makes
this one person so important?
This is a valid question, but a narrative approach to public speaking has an equally valid
response. What makes Fisher’s notion of homo narrans relevant to public speaking is the
capacity narrative has to build a sense of identification between the audience and speaker.
This sense of identification comes when social issues are framed through an individual’s
lived experience, in other words when social issues are given a face, we are more likely to
remember the information being told us and more likely to act on that social issue.
Think back to a time when you were listening to a story (it may have been this morning
when your parents told you a story about what the dog did, or it may have been a friend of
yours over the weekend sharing an interesting something that happened to him/her). How
do you feel when you listen to a story? If this person was a particularly good storyteller,
s/he may have held your complete attention in the telling, maybe you were at the edge
your seat. A good story can convey there feeling that you are there, inside the telling. You
may end up replacing the main character with yourself: seeing what the main character is
seeing, feeling what the main character is feeling, thinking what the main character may
have thought. It is this capacity of story to make the listeners feel s/he is part of the story
from which narrative draws its power, especially in the realm of public speaking.
For example, Paul Slovic (2000), risk consultant and psychology professor at the University
of Oregon, noticed that individuals tended to donate more money to a cause if it was
framed through the perspective of one person as opposed to being framed rather than
when presented with holistic figures of the misfortune. In other words, narratives, rather
than statistics, motivated people to reach further into their pockets. It is not that large
death tolls do not encourage people to donate, our recent experiences with tsunamis and
earthquakes would say otherwise. Rather, abstract representations of catastrophe’s, such
as death tolls, only work so far to convey the devastation—our minds cannot conceive of
that much travesty. Focusing on one person among the thousands allows your audience a
chance to not only become aware of the scope of the travesty, but also experience what it is
like to live the travesty. Because of this deeper layer of insight into a travesty, listeners may
have felt a sense of identification with the suffering people and more encouraged to help
financially.
To further, hearing large death tolls also has an adverse effects on a listener’s sense of
agency. After all, what can one person do to stop all the suffering and injustice of the world.
Walter Fisher noted, “Persons may even choose not to participate in the making of public
narratives (vote) if they feel that they are meaningless spectators rather than co-authors”
(1984, p. 10). If we feel we can make a difference in one person’s life (become a co-author
of his/her triumph over adversity), we are more willing to help out. If we feel our we are
unable to make a difference (after all, what can one person do to stop injustices against
thousands of people), we may save our efforts to causes where we can make a difference.
Narrative is way to convey the scope of broad, social injustices in a manner that may
convince the audience that they can make a difference to reduce social inequities.
In sum, narrative is a powerful approach to public speaking that provides the speaker with the
tools to make his/her audience feel they are inside the speech by putting a face on the topic to
which the speaker is speaking. It is the hope of narrative that by focusing on the lived
experiences of a few individuals, we may draw attention to larger social issues that confront us
all.
References:
Fisher, W. R. (1984). Narration as a human communication paradigm: The case of public moral
argument. Communication monographs, 51, 1-22.
Slovic, P. (2000). The more who die, the less we care. In P. Slovic (Ed.), The feeling of risk (pp.
69-77). London: Earthscan.