Have you ever met anyone who was horrible at telling anecdotes? Do you cringe every time they start telling a story? Not only is the content of the story not all that entertaining to begin with, but they can’t get it across in an interesting fashion either. They’ll have pauses that I guess are supposed to be…dramatic, but it just ends up being awkward. For example, they’ll stop after like the first word in the sentence for five seconds while you sit there flipping out because it’s taking forever for them to get to the point. And they’ll insert these abrupt obnoxious pauses every other sentence or so making it incredibly difficult to keep up with what they’re talking about. As if this wasn’t enough, they’ll also add random facts that are completely unrelated to the story. Maybe they’re just trying to be insightful?

So to try and ameliorate this increasingly prominent problem I’ve come up with a list of six helpful anecdote telling tips:

• Get on with it. No one wants to sit around for 10 minutes waiting for you to get to the meat of the story.
• Don’t bother telling us totally irrelevant pieces of information. We don’t care if oh, by the way, Shirley used to date John unless it matters.
• If you’re not sure if the people you’re with would want to hear your story, they probably don’t. Anecdotes should be tailored to the crowd listening. Just save yourself from looking retarded and don’t bother unless you know they want to hear it.
• Never say, “Am I right?” after your punchline. If you have to ask, you’re probably wrong. That, and you’ll sound like a third rate comedian.
• Don’t leave people hanging. Too often people start telling anecdotes and people will be interested and then you finish…but you didn’t really say anything interesting. Make sure your story actually goes somewhere. You don’t want people to say, “Go on…”.
• Dramatic pauses, hand gestures, and props should be used sparingly. Just be careful, and be aware of the frequency with which you utilize these oft-abused story telling devices.

Just follow these few simple rules and you’ll be well on your way to telling funny, interesting, and well received anecdotes in no time. With some practice, you too can have people saying that you’re the funniest guy at the office.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.