TED talks began in the year 1984 as a conference about technology, education, and design, hence the name TED. Today, these powerful presentations cover a variety of topics outside of the main three and are a household name. Each TED talk is unique and but they are all told as interesting and insightful speeches. Many use elements of storytelling to convey their message to the audience. When comparing The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi to How I Found a Mythical Boiling River in the Amazon by Andrés Ruzo one can see the many differences and similarities between these meaningful presentations. The differences between these TED talks are vast since the cover very different topics. One of those differences being the use of character. …show more content…
This helps the audience understand what a single story is, the most important key to understanding her speech. Her usage of point of view entices the listener to reflect on what single stories they might hold in their mind so after the speech they might go out and seek more stories that would expand their point of view on the world and those who inhabit it. It is almost a call to action to learn more about the world. Ruzo uses point of view from a more scientific perspective explaining his confusion regarding how a boiling river could exist without a volcano nearby Ruzo’s TED talk is very different from Adichi’s for a number of reasons. The first being his use of plot. Rather than telling many small stories to create a bigger story and establish a theme Ruzo uses the childhood story as an invitation to tell the bigger story of him discovering the river. His use of plot keeps the audience intrigued because it has an air of mystery. The listener doesn’t know if the mythical river will really be boiling or just a huge
Stories are the way humans share, create, and explore their many experiences and identities with each other. When a story is told, the original content lingers depending upon how the storyteller recalls the content. Once the story is retold, it often takes on different details and meanings, because each storyteller adds their own perspective, experience, and meaning. The story then begins to have its own life. Each storyteller has a connection to the beginning and the end of the story.
Napoleon Chagnon has spent about 60 months since 1964 studying the ‘foot people’ of the Amazon Basin known as the Yanomamo. In his ethnography, Yanomamo, he describes all of the events of his stay in the Venezuelan jungle. He describes the “hideous” appearance of the Yanomamo men when first meeting them, and their never-ending demands for Chagnon’s foreign goods, including his food. There are many issues that arise when considering Chagnon’s Yanomamo study. The withholding of genealogical information by the tribesmen, and how Chagnon was able to obtain his information is an interesting and significant aspect of this study. Why did Chagnon feel that this genealogical information was important? And was Chagnon’s choice to study the Yanomamo, despite their hesitancy to cooperate, a wise and ethical one?
through the speeches helps the reader understand and feel like they were there, it makes that
The speech delivered by Dr. Randy Pausch is a powerful and influential public speaking, including various communication components that we should pay attention to and learn when we present our speeches. This lecture is divided into three parts: My childhood dreams, enabling the dreams of others and lessons learned. Dr. Randy Pausch told his audience what he believed and valued with his proper body languages, effective and efficient delivery and interesting and attractive visual aids. From this speech, it can be told that the speaker’s strengths and effectiveness from the lecture, which can reflect my problems as a communicator and a public speaker
The TED Talk “Why 30 is not the new 20” by Meg Jay, was a powerful and successful speech. Jay delivers an inspirational message to twenty-year-olds to not waste away important years of their life in an unmeaningful relationship or career. Instead she stresses the importance of searching for a life-long partner sooner rather than later in life. She also talked about taking career risks while still young, because these opportunities will likely be indefeasible later in life. Jay 's main points were very effective in persuading one to consider living by this set of social standards. It is clear that Meg Jay is an experienced public speaker, because of how well the overall presentation was. She does all of the basics perfectly, such as standing
“Lecture” and “boring” are two words often synonymous. A lecture will frequently feature a deluge of scientific data, equitable facts, well-supported inferences, unbiased jargon, charts, graphs, and statistics. And a bored audience. While a lecture can pioneer new scientific exploration and present phenomenal achievement, it holds little value if it cannot inspire its audience. In order for a lecture to interest the everyday individual, it needs to provide a clear connection to the everyday world. Firstly, the speaker must deliver his or her data in a discussion format comprehensible to the audience. Then, the speaker must excite the audience with powerful emotional appeals. An effective lecture – now, truly, a presentation – appeals to an audience by accentuating a necessity and evoking an enthusiasm. The audience finds an immediate, personal significance within the vast data. In his 2006 documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore uses a combination of appeals to logic and emotion to stress the urgency of the global warming crisis to an audience of everyday individuals.
The short stories of Ted Chiang are written in a way such that the overarching structure help to give a deeper meaning to the stories. The rationale for why Chiang writes in this way is to help vary his writing style and help give the story more meaning without writing more words. Ted Chiang manipulates the structure of one of his works, “Story of Your Life,” for the purpose of augmenting the meaning the story and its underlying themes, while also using it to build a stronger relationship to the audience.
The title has one line, representing the son’s age as one and the first stanza has two lines, representing the son’s age as two – this continues until stanza five when the child is five. At the age of five, the son “waits in [his father’s] lap” (3) and awaits a new story; this is when the father realizes that he is unable to come up with a new story and begins to fear his son’s disappointment. The following stanza has four lines, representing how the father wishes to go back to a time where he was able to entertain the son with the “alligator story” or the “angel story” (13) without the sons desire for something new. The final stanza has five lines, this is because it is the reality which the father has to face because his son will not ‘become younger’ or interested again in the stories that he has heard before. The structure of the poem expresses the complexity of the internal struggle of the father to fill his son’s desire as he reaches an age in which stories that he has already heard do not entertain him through the purposefully structured stanzas that represent the son’s growth along with the father’s wish to go back rather than
I choose the ted talk of journalist Jon Ronson: Strange answers to the psychopath test. His speech had various strong points and personal experiences. He uses various strategies to hook his audience and get his point out. He engages with the audience and gets them to listen he keeps them engaged by having humor and telling stories. He uses statistics to infom the audience and even tries to calculate how many psychopaths there is in the audience. He has verbal and nonverbal cues that connect is main points.
When speaker Brené Brown was about to give a talk, the event coordinator struggled with calling her a “researcher,” saying that people might not want to come because they would think she was “boring and irrelevant.” Instead, she wanted to call her a “storyteller” since she thought Brene´Brown’s story-telling abilities were a highpoint. Brown’s academic insecurity was not satisfied in simply being called a “storyteller.” She decided her qualitative research was, in actuality, collecting stories and concluded, stories, were “data with a soul.” She then embraced the title “Researcher-Story-teller,” which combined her unique abilities (Brown, 2010). Building our own personal brand is a combination of strengths; its “what makes us
...hen you reach the end the boy has taken a turn and instantly matures in the last sentence. Something like that doesn’t just happen in a matter of seconds. Therefore the readers gets the sense that the narrator is the boy all grown up. He is recollecting his epiphany within the story allowing the readers to realize themselves that the aspiration to live and dream continues throughout the rest of ones life. The narrator remembers this story as a transformation from innocence to knowledge. Imagination and reality clearly become two different things to the narrator; an awareness that everyone goes though at some point in their life. It may not be as dramatic as this story but it gradually happens and the innocence is no longer present.
The fictional life and death of a twelve year old little boy named Robert is vividly articulated in this moving tale by Thomas Wolfe. The reader learns of the boy’s life through four well developed points of view. The reader’s first glimpse into Robert’s character is expressed through a third person narrative. This section takes place on a particularly important afternoon in the boy’s life. The second and third views are memories of the child, through the eyes of his mother and sister. His mother paints the picture of an extraordinary child whom she loved dearly and his sister illustrates the love that the boy had for others. Finally, an account from the narrator is given in the ending. It is in the last section of this work that the narrator attempts to regain his own memories of his lost brother.
Savu, Laura. “The Crooked Business of Storytelling”. Ariel. Summer 2005 36. 3-4 Gale Cengage Learning. Thomson Gale. Webster Schroeder Library, Webster, NY. 31 January 2014.
I have also learned about different types of audiences and speeches including persuasive, informative, entertaining and delivering special occasion speeches. It came to my attention that whenever I was making these presentations or speeches, I needed to do so with confidence, consistence and practice before the actual presentation and completely eliminate the element of panic. It was also clear that capturing the attention of the audience and engaging them in the whole process, it was necessary to have a very strong introduction and also try and use visuals to deliver the message. It was therefore vital to respect each person’s diversity and cultural values (Lucas, 2011).
The Amazon River Amazon River is the world's second longest river and the chief river