In the average one-minute speech, the typical student uses 2.5 statistics. Only one student in ten tells a story. Those are the speaking statistics. The “remembering” statistics, on the other hand, are almost a mirror image: When students are asked to recall the speeches, 63% remember the stories. Only 5% remember any individual statistic. (Heath and Heath 2008) Regardless of how highly some of the students were rated by their peers, the articulate speakers’ ideas were no more memorable than those of the poorly rated ones. In the moment, the other students enjoyed their eloquent pitches, but
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