Читать книгу What She Said - Monica Lunin - Страница 22

From the very beginning of her lecture, Virginia Woolf shares her own creative meanderings. When considering the subject of women in fiction and working through what to say she tells her audience she ‘sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant’. Throughout the speech, Woolf steps in and out of the roles of the advice giver, the storyteller and the speechmaker.

She goes on to tell us the central component of her idea, at once also sharing its limitations. Then she tells us she will take us through how she arrived at this opinion. Later, she indicates when she will be moving on to the peroration, or conclusion, of the lecture. It is as though she is exposing the formwork of her talk — in the same way as Brecht's plays in the 1920s aimed to expose the mechanisms of theatre — and I like to think this was, like Brecht, purposely done because it most definitely enhances the piece.

This is a useful and quite straightforward technique to use in your own presentations. When you have been invited to share your thoughts or personal experience and you are not sure how to structure your talk, perhaps, like Woolf, you could start with the topic you were given. Make it personal and begin with a first-person exposé of how you relate to the topic. ‘Shakespeare's sister’ is an enchanting example of how a speaker can think out loud, drawing their audience in and making them part of the wonder of discovery.