Chapter 61 Start your speech with a story

We especially love speakers who tell stories from their own experiences, and Russell Kenwall's "Diamond Land" lecture was given more than 6,000 times and made him millions.So how did it begin as a popular speech? In 1870, we set out along the Tigris River.In Baghdad we hired a guide so that he could help us find Persepolis, Nineveh and Babylon... It is clear that the speaker is not getting to the point, he is telling a story, and it is this story that grabs the audience's attention.This way of opening a speech is almost foolproof.As the story unfolds and develops, the audience is constantly thinking about what will happen next.

Here are two opening sentences, taken from two stories in the same Saturday Evening Post: (1) Sharp gunshots broke the silence. (2) During the first week of July, a seemingly trivial incident occurred at the Mount Dangerous Hotel in Dover.This aroused the great curiosity of its manager Gobel, so he informed the owner of the hotel, Steve Faraday, and several other Faraday hotels, just a few days before Steve's midsummer tour It's time. Notice how these opening words play their role.They always trigger the next, pique your curiosity, make you read on, eager to know more, make you want to figure it all out.Even a novice speaker with little experience can start a speech successfully if you can use the technique of "starting with a story" and thereby pique your audience's curiosity.