The Lost Art of the Great Speech: How to Write It * How to Deliver It

Anecdotes can help

Still, there are other ways to accomplish the same purpose. One way is to use anecdotes. How much more interesting the insurance executive's speech would have been if the speaker had cited an actual example of a hospital patient who had suffered what he called an ''adverse patient occurrence.'' I assume that is a bit of euphemistic jargon meaning that something bad happened to the patient in the hospital, and whatever it was wasn't related to what the patient was hospitalized for. After telling what happened to the patient, the speaker might have said something like this:

And that lady's experience wasn't at all unusual. It happens to between 20 and 30 percent of all hospital patients. Just think about that for a minute: If ...