Advanced Presentations by Design: Creating Communication That Drives Action

Chapter 5. Assembling the Anecdotes That Will Illustrate Your Evidence

Step 5: Identify Brief Anecdotes That Highlight Your Most Important Points

The next step is to identify any useful anecdotes or stories that can be used to illustrate your most important points. The idea here is not to replace the evidence you have gathered, but to emphasize it. A story is not proof; it is just illustration. A story doesn't prove anything, but it does get your audience's attention and can sometimes drive a point home much more than reams of data. From a scientific perspective, this can seem frustrating: people appear to be more persuaded by a story about a single incident (i.e. a sample size of one) than by a survey with a sample size of five hundred. But a ...