Thesis: Establishing credibility with any audience is heavily based on your relationship with the audience. Whether your audience is close friends or complete strangers, you need to know where you stand with them and who they are before you can address them.
Story about the embarcadero and free ice cream – A community I belong to is people who skateboard in San Francisco. A couple of weeks ago I went skateboarding on the Embarcadero with three friends of mine. There is a small plaza on the Embarcadero that is smooth granite with a couple of ledge features where every weekend a crowd of skateboarders ranging from 5 people to 30 people congregate to skate the plaza and hang out. While hanging out at EMB with my friends, we were approached by another skateboarder and quickly got wrapped up in conversation. We ended up staying on the embarcadero for a long time that day and talked with our new friend for a number of hours. As the topics of conversation shifted I realized that this skateboarder knew one of my friends from home which was completely random because the town I live in is on the complete other side of the country and not to mention my town has less than 5,000 residents. After talking about this for a while, our friend told us a story about he and a couple of his friends went to the famous Humphry Slocombe ice cream shop in the ferry building after skating at EMB and the cashier refused to let them pay because he saw that they skateboarded as well. At the time I remember not thinking much of this story and dismissing it little after he told us. As the day went on we skated until it got dark then decided it was about time to head home but before we left, one of my friends who had been skating during our friend’s story about the free ice cream suggested that we go to Humphry Slocombe before leaving. We packed up our things and skated over to the ferry building where all four of us ordered ice cream but when we tried to pay, the ordinary-looking guy behind the counter refused to take any money we tried to give him. After that we thanked him and went on our way. That is my story about my community.
Explain the difference between telling story to different audiences
- Differences in tone and diction
- Less ‘slang’ because I know the audience
- Emphasizing different aspects of the story based on the audience’s relationship with the story