Gramer Girl here. I'm Minion Fogarty and today I'm here talking with Joel Schwartzberg.

Joel is the senior director of strategic and executive communication for the American

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He is a frequent speaker and workshop leader,

a national champion and state champion competitive public speaker and I'll definitely ask him about

and he's the author of Get to the Point. Sharpen your message and make your words matter.

Hi Joel, thanks for being here today. It's my pleasure, Minion. You bet. Well, since your book is

called Get to the Point, I'm feeling some pressure to get to the point. So... Most people do when they

talk to me. Right, people worry about their grammar when they talk to me. So maybe let's start with

what's the difference between having a point and just presenting an idea. Right, and that's a

crucial difference because most people conflate the two. They confuse points with things like topics,

categories, themes, notions, titles, catch phrases and they go into a communication setting, whether

it's a public speech or an email or just a morning meeting and when you lead with a topic but not a

point, you leave yourself pointless, which leads to rambling and all kinds of epic fail. The big

difference between a point and something that's not a point, one of those things I mentioned,

is that a point is really an argument. You're making a case for something that you can prove with

data, stories, illustration, the case study and it should take you more than a few seconds to

make that case because you're trying to have impact on someone. And what I like to say is you're

really not having that kind of impact. You're not moving someone to a new idea or a new action

unless you're making a point, a true argument, a proposition of value.

So I know that the word storytelling has been a big buzz word for presentations for at least

the last five years or so and people say, you know, you should entertain your audience, maybe be

funny. And can you talk about maybe that there has to be an intersection between storytelling

...