Try it.

I want you to pick a word, you emphasize it. I also want you to add a little microsecond of a pause after that word, OK?

If you want to engage the audience a little more and draw them in, you do have the choice to emphasize different words. From now on, I don’t care what word you emphasize, but let’s use the next six sentences.

Excellent. This is something you could use to your benefit. Your English is fantastic. You are a great English speaker, but you tend to use a monotone when you speak.

Exactly. Were you able to hear the difference in the sentences when I did that?

Mary had a little *lamb*.

Mary had a *little* lamb.

What about past tense? Mary had *a* little lamb.

I need to clock with you. Mary *had* a little lamb.

Do you hear that, by the way?

*Mary* had a little lamb.

I’m going to do them as well, and then you are going to read the part back to me, on the right-hand side, OK?

Now, do the last one.

Do the fourth one.

Do the third one, please.

Do the next one, please.

Yes, please.

Here is what I want you to do. This is very, very simple. There’s five or six sentences here. One word is boldface. Read each one, and emphasize either loudness or strength of voice, the word that is in boldface, OK?

About time, huh?

Just did it again.

This thing didn’t go in?

How about the Skype. Did the Skype one open yet? Did it download?

It’s a very simple document. It’s not a big file, believe me.

Get it?

I got to email it to you, do it the old-fashioned way.

I want you to do it with me. Let me know when it’s over, OK?

You got it. You can have it. I’ll email it to you as well if it doesn’t...You can download it from there.

Oh, I just drop it into your frame, right? Exactly. Onto your face?

I’ll email it to you, probably. Show me how to share it on Skype. Where do I go?

Interesting. I forgot to give you that one. I know why, because vocal modulation is very hard to do on your own. Let me find it. I made a decision to not do that one. Here we go. Can I share this on Skype?

What do you have?

I think it’s called vocal modulation.

Do me a favor. Let’s work on a little vocal modulation as well. Then we’ll put this together. We’ll start putting some of this stuff together. Will you bring up that sheet on vocal modulation? You have it handy?

Got it. I understand. That’s a very simple storytelling trope. The before, the action, the result. The result, by the way, it doesn’t always have to be positive. It’s quite interesting when it doesn’t work. Maybe there’s a rub, or maybe you should do a tweak, or maybe something else ...

The third one is participation.

This is the...

Let’s see the first one. This is who I am.

Good. Give me another one.

I do think if you use it four times, it’s going to get repetitive.

Possibly. I don’t want you to use the same format. I wanted to give you the sense of the storytelling arc of before, here is what we did, here is the result.

Why? What was the matter?

Did that feel better to you?

This is how it worked before. When I came in, I saw this problem, and I did this. Here is how it’s working today. It’s not perfect, but it’s done this, this, and this. You don’t have to overexplain it. Let me hear you.

Say a little less. Try that again, and give it to me in about...That was probably about three minutes. I wasn’t timing it. Let me see if you can condense quickly as you’re walking through this. Let me see if I can guide you a little bit, OK?

Give me the before and the after, OK? Let me hear.

Can you talk about this again for me, please? Do it this way. Before, there was this program, this is how it worked. I need the before and after, so I can understand it better. Again, the intricacies of the Taiwanese government are not well known, or not necessarily that ...

Tell me some more, please.

Yeah. That you actually brought democracy to the street. I don’t know if the people understood what was going on or not, but you actually enabled them to understand it and bring it to them. Give me the upshot of this stuff, OK?

What’s really important here is the result of this action. Equally, the results of the Occupy action, because you actually went out and got involved.

Oh. I didn’t realize you were on your bed. That explains the rocking. No problem.