TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

There are lots of tools you can use here, in addition to the intuition pumps mentioned earlier, or the detective story approach. Inject some humor early on. This communicates a useful message: I’m going to pull you through some demanding thinking . . . but it’s going to be fun. We’ll sweat together and laugh together. Add an anecdote. Maybe one that reveals how you got engaged in this issue. It humanizes you. If people know why you’re passionate about the issue, they’re more likely to listen to your logic. Offer vivid examples. If I wanted to persuade you that external reality is nothing like you believe it to be, I might first show a slide of a dramatic optical illusion. Just because something looks a certain way, doesn’t make it so. Recruit third-party validation. “My colleagues at Harvard and I have spent ten years looking at the data, and we’ve unanimously concluded it has to be seen this way.” Or, “And that’s why it’s not just me arguing this; every mother of a two-year-old boy knows this to be true.” Statements like these need careful handling as neither is a valid argument in itself, but, depending on the audience, they may make your argument more persuasive. Use powerful visuals. At one point in his talk, Dan Pallotta uses pie charts to show the results of two nonprofits’ fundraising efforts. First, a bake sale with 5 percent overhead, and second, a professional fundraising enterprise with 40 percent overhead. The second one looks terrible, wasteful, until Dan says...