In this week’s reading material, 7 Storytelling Techniques Used by the Most Inspiring TED Presenters, I found the most compelling TED presenter for me is Dananjaya Hettiarachchi.

Metaphor

At the beginning and end of this presentation, he used a rose to liken a human’s life, it draws the audience’s attention, which is connected to the whole presentation.

Tone

During his presentation, he used a conversational tone, which applied Mayer’s Personalization Principle, and he keep changing the tone when he had a different character in his story.

Control in pace

This isn’t a long presentation, shorter presentations also allow the audience to choose the topic or subtopic they want to focus on, which applies to Mayer’s Segmenting Principle. He paused sometimes and he had questions for the audience to reflect on the topics, which he can draw the attention of the audience.

Dananjaya Hettiarachchi told captivating stories, and he asked rhetorical thought-provoking questions. With all these skills applied, no wonder he is the WDC of public speaking.