Thursday, May 2, 2013

Make It Memorable by Bob Dotson

Regarding the book by Bob Dotson, Make It Memorable: Please read the introduction and Section One (pages 3-41). Then, answer the following questions and be sure to exceed the requested word counts:

o What do you notice about the way he writes? Use specific examples, please. (75 words)
Bob Dotson writes stories to benefit others and to influence his readers.  He wants to help his readers become better at what they want to do by being creative and doing things differently.  Throughout his writing, he explains in detail how to improve yourself and your stories.  He gives off little pieces of advice that work together to make your story that much better.  For example, he gives the idea to "look for things that the audience cannot see or hear for themselves... Tell them what they might have missed even standing next to you" (p. 27).

o What did you learn from reading pages 9 to 27? (75 words)
Do all that you can in order to make your story engaging and different from others.  Take the information that you have and make it interesting if it isn't.  You can do this by focusing on a small topic that listeners might be interested in and get as in depth as possible with details.  Rather than hearing the same things all over again repeatedly, listers want to hear something different; a story they have never heard before or anything like it.

o With the scripts: What do suppose is described in each column? Why would it be split like that? What else is interesting about the scripts? (50 words)
In the scripts: in each column, he uses examples to demonstrate what he taught you in the previous pages.  These examples are meant to help you fully understand what he meant when he was explaining it.  Its split to make it easier for the reader to understand and read.  I thought that the scripts were interesting because they all give little details of information that you may not get from a broader told story on the subject.

o On Page 34 (and to the end of the section), Dotson writes about a long-form feature. Find one of these (a story at least 4 minutes long) on a TV news magazine such as Rock Center, 20/20 or 60 Minutes. Then, give and explain examples of how the storyteller uses the five bulleted traits Dotson gives on Page 34. (200 words)

I watched Jackie Hance thought sister-in-law was 'good mom' before Taconic crash, a 9 minute story, off of Rock Center.  It was about a mom who trusted her sister-in-law to bring her 3 daughters on a safe camping trip that was meant to be a good experience for all of them.  Bob Dotson first talked about the setting.  The scene was set in an interview room with the mother of the girls and the interviewer, Brian Williams.  They talked about where the crash took place, which was on the Taconic Parkway.  Videos of the girls playing and sounds from the highway were used as natural sound while she was being interviewed. Foreshadowing was used when they showed the mother's book in the begging called "I'll See You Again" with a picture of her daughters on it. The conflict was the mother putting trust in a seemingly reliable sister-in-law but it turns out to be otherwise when she gets an alarming call from her oldest daughter crying over the phone "somethings wrong with her" as she was driving down the street onto oncoming traffic. The character growth was at first she talked about how the sister-in-law seemed trustworthy even as a friend, but later goes into further detail how she never really knew much about her.  The Resolution ended with police finding marijuana and high alcohol levels in her blood from her body and the mother talking about all she finds herself doing is blaming herself for trusting a stranger.


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