Demo's & Stories

Demonstrations make your points more tangible and therefore memorable. The more levels on which you mentally process a concept, the more memorable that concept will be. Showing something to your audience, or making something happen in front of them, or best of all getting them to do something themselves, will bed your point down much more solidly into memory.

People can be reluctant to use demonstrations or simply don’t think of doing so. Pictured is the renowned physicist Richard Feynman who headed the commission investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986. The photograph shows Feynman making a simple demonstration to the world’s press. He placed a piece of the rubber O-ring from the Shuttle into a small clamp and submerged the clamped specimen into a polystyrene cup filled with iced water. He then demonstrated the process (a loss of resilience at low temperatures) by which the rubber o-rings on the shuttle failed, thus causing the disaster. Although a very humble demonstration, it was effective and memorable; and made the front page of the New York Times the following day.

Stories, as a communication tool, work in a different way. Most conversations consist of an exchange of short anecdotes and shared experiences. These stories can be thought of as structured chunks of experience. We have been learning how to use this structuring tool from the time we learnt how to talk, so much so that we don’t realise how sophisticated the skill is. However, people discard this tool, needlessly, when presenting. By using even the briefest anecdotes – related, of course, to the topic of your talk - you are availing of a simple and powerful way of keeping your audience’s interest and making your presentation memorable.

The use of these two communication tools is explored in detail. The psychology of memory is also looked at to gain a better understanding of just what an audience is likely to remember from an oral presentation.