What’s your slant?

I recently sat through yet another excruciatingly dull presentation and it puzzled me. The speaker was someone that I knew from Toastmasters. He is a skilled speaker and I have enjoyed listening to him speak before. He was talking about a subject I am interested in and the title sounded provocative. Yet, the presentation nearly put me to sleep.

I was thinking about it on the way home on the train and something popped to mind that an editor told me, a very long time ago in my student days. I was working at the campus newspaper and had just finished a piece on the gymnastics team. While there was nothing earthshaking about the news, one of the gymnasts, a freshman, had qualified for the national championships. I wrote an innocuous piece to go along with my photos.

The newspaper’s advisor, a retired newspaper editor, took a look at what I had written and with a pained look on her face asked me, “So what’s your slant?”

I believe my response at the time was, “Hunh?”

“What does this information mean?” she asked. “Why should I care?”

As she was clearly having a senior moment and couldn’t put the pieces together, I patiently explained to her that after several disappointing seasons, the team was undergoing a changing of the guard. This young freshman, along with some of her equally young and talented teammates, was the face of a brighter future for the team.

“Why the hell didn’t you say so?” she snapped, tossing the pages back on my desk.

That’s what was missing from my friend’s presentation. He had a lot of interesting information to share, but he had no slant; no personal perspective or larger message, no story for me to sink my teeth into, no conclusion he had drawn from it.

That’s the speaker’s job, to show me why I should care.