Robert McKee on Business Storytelling

Robert McKee wrote the screen writing class Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting. (He made the Annie Hall-style cameo in Adaptation.) I read it a several times over the years -- that's a lot considering I'm the only species of copywriter who has no interest in writing a screenplay. But he lays out how to tell a story--and that's what creative work is.

Presentation Zen featured this video of him talking about business presentations. I'd like know more about his POV, alas, this clip will be all we get from him today.

“What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.” -- Robert McKee

F#%k Yeah It's Persuasive, &%$#@!'s

The January issue of Inside Influence, had an interesting article by Noah Goldstein, Ph.D.

Social psychologists Cory Scherer and Brad Sagarin hypothesized that when people pepper their speech with an occasional obscenity, the audience perceives an increase in the speaker’s intensity, perceived passion and enthusiasm. Ultimately, it makes the speech more persuasive.

So did it?

To test this idea, Scherer and Sagarin had participants watch a video of a five-minute long persuasive speech. For half of the participants, the speaker used the relatively tame swear phrase “Damn it!” once during the speech. For the other half of participants, the speech was exactly the same, except the swear phrase was omitted. Once the speech was over, participants were asked about their attitudes toward the topic addressed in the speech. Consistent with predictions, the data revealed not only that the speaker was viewed as more passionate about the topic when profanity was used than when it was not, but also that the former was more persuasive than the latter.

Hell yeah it did.