Week 12

Are there some common characteristics to great speakers and presenters? What is it that makes them so compelling? Is there a common pattern to great speeches and communications? According to Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte Design in Silicon Valley the answer is “Yes”.

Nancy Duarte says that the best spoken genre, the one that resonates in audiences and lingers in time, is story. She claims that great communications (either speeches or presentations) follow patterns that are similar to the patterns of great stories. After making her point, she comes with a “shape” of great speeches and she walks us through this shape using two great models of American speakers and some of their most famous public addresses. Here’s her presentation at TED:



Remember, effective speeches mimic the pattern of great stories, but you, the speaker, are not the hero, but the mentor and you have to try to convince the audience they are the heroes. At the level of structure you have to come back and forward between the status quo and the ideal and better future. This applies for commercial presentation (competitors vs. your product) as well as political speeches (the author candidate vs. “me”).

Then we proceeded with the next genre in our syllabus: movies. Movies can be defined in different ways. We can say that a movie is a sequence of pictures in motion that narrates a story or that a movie is an audiovisual text that present a piece of fiction (these definitions were given by you in class). Movies can be classified by genres (action, horror, comedy, etc.) or by the age of the intended audience (PG, PG-13, R) or even by the kind of producers (commercial movies vs. independent movies). As other narrative, movies have a main character with a desire or problem, there is a climax or a crucial event that turns the character’s world upside-down and then a resolution, after which the character is transformed. We also looked at some of the ways in which meanings and emotions are conveyed in movies through music, lighting, cinematography and other visual elements.

Friday. we started watching the movie assigned for this semester: Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange . Although this movie is quite old, I think you will notice the validity of many of the points it makes and how current its topic and technical style is. I leave you with its trailer: