Comparing two TED talks

The first TED I watched was A Story of Mixed Emoticons, this one I enjoyed watching. I liked how he told us a story the emoticons and how it was easy to follow. Compared to other TED talks when I didn’t have an idea of what was going on, Rives talk made sense the entire time. As the presenter he was dressed casually and relied on the screen for a majority of his speech. But, if he hadn’t relied on the screen throughout the story he was telling, the speech wouldn’t have been the same. He built his speech into the images, which were popping up on the screen, these images then created a story. Everything he does has a casual affect on his presentation, and makes it seem real, like people talk in emoticons everyday all day.  This story that he tells his audience seems as if it would be a high school movie.

The story in The Best Gift I Ever Survived is more formal and personal to the speaker, Stacey Kramer. By the way she is dressed, how she is presenting the speech, and what impact it has had on her is what makes this speech so personal. When the video first starts, she tells us about a gift that she had received and shows us a picture of a little blue box, the viewer doesn’t know or expect something so dramatic as what she is about to reveal to us. As she goes on through her speech, she continues to describe to us this gift, this gift quickly turned into a bio-hazard bag. She revealed to the audience that she once had brain cancer. Once the viewer hears about her gift, it’s shocking to think that someone like the speaker, who seems to have a normal life, would have gone through such a traumatic and scary event.

While these talks are both very different stories, speeches, and presentational styles, their stories both have an everyday occurrence to them. In the emoticon story, everyday people used emoticons in conversations or to even lead a conversation. In Stacey Kramer’s speech everyone, everyday gets cancer and is surviving it. Ones presentation was casual, and the other was formal. Both of the speeches had different effects on the audience. Overall I liked both of the speeches and how each of them were so different, by they worked with the stories the speakers were trying to tell.