Stories that Move Mountains: Storytelling and Visual Design for Persuasive Presentations

Delivery Tips

If I am to speak for ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.

Woodrow Wilson, 28^th President of the United States

Build rehearsals and time for feedback into the delivery plan. Practice, practice, and practice some more, then throw away your notes. Rehearsals are fine for thinking about what you will say and how you will perform, but they should never be confused with the real event. Good storytellers are not just actors remembering lines; they are participants in the telling of the story. Your rehearsals should be about understanding the content of the visual story. Whether it is for a minute or an hour, rehearsals help you tell the story as though it were a treasured memory.

Audiences get bored easily. Good storytellers do not give you time to lose interest. Plan your sequence of deliveries and your sequence of events within a delivery to recapture attention every ten minutes with something different. This may mean moving between theory, practice, and example to cover learning styles, or from images to facts to video. Do whatever it takes to capture the wildly roaming attention of your audience.

Some stories have a timeless quality. The visual stories we describe are more likely to be transient by design and suitable only for the context in which they are created. You may see them referred to long after the activity they were used for as being great examples, but wonder ...