It’s Not about Google – It’s about You
Anyone who has taken a Dale Carnegie public speaking course will recall when nervous participants garnered energy and confidence to deliver moving speeches. The talks often made the audience cry – on topics close to the heart that didn’t need many facts, but did require lots of digging deep into memories and feelings.
While those folks were freed, we are all prisoners of the formal genre when it comes to writing. And mostly, it can be argued, rightly so. We want facts, some opinions or a recommendation, without the heart-felt discourse. Or is that really the case? A few listeners at a business presentation on the power of customer service may fidget uncomfortably in their seats during an emotional talk about the joy of receiving home-delivered flowers; many others, however, will shed a tear.
Is there a problem with being more personal and speaking from experience in formal writing?
The Dale Carnegie website writes that “good talks are the ones that well up within you as a fountain.” Taking to your keyboard to write a report on, say, the development of the coffee market, you’ll operate like many others. You’ll start a fact-finding mission, jump onto the web and, most probably, to Google. It’s almost foreordained that you’ll deliver a comprehensive report brimming with facts and references, but one that, like many others, will not be as compelling as you might wish.
Consider the other approach. Whether or not you drink coffee, you know it works in sensory and at times addictive ways on people. You see the coffee market as a reflection of the product’s effect on each and every one of us, and choose to delve first into what this is. You may talk to people you know, or others you befriend at a café. The formulaic “insights” you would have gleaned from the web will be transformed into personal takes that pull with conviction and resonate with immediacy. They’ll bring alive coffee’s attraction and magic or, conversely, the things that make some people avoid it. Taken together, you’ll have created a knowledge bank for a meaningful exposé. Facts and figures will be added to further support your points, with others tucked away in an appendix. The result? A report that more than one person will want to read.
So consider this: before you look to Google – look to yourself.
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