A few weeks in class, Prof. Natov shared an anecdote from her childhood. “I was ten years old and I realized my cousins were seven years old,” she said. “And I thought to myself, ‘they’re getting so old! And I was only ten!” This anecdote set up the classroom discussion about turning points. For Prof. Natov, viewing her cousins in a different light due to their age sets up “before” and “after” moments in her anecdote, the “before” implying that she had seen her cousins as much younger and the “after” in the realization that she, too, was getting older, and maybe even realizing that she was saying something that adults had to said to her at one point! Everyone in the class named three turning points in their life, and then Prof. Natov asked us two important questions: why were some moments turning points? Which moments did you want to know more about?

Ultimately her questions pointed to a larger lesson: the importance of creating context for your audience through the use of specific examples and details. These details and examples create a richer experience for your audience and, when a turning point occurs, creates the impact of such a moment. 

Here are some turning points from literature that became key points in the movies:

 

[videogallery id=”1_turning points”]

 

I chose clips that specifically cut to those familiar, famous lines; however, those lines would have meant nothing had the authors (or in the case of the movies, the directors) hadn’t shown us the “before” of both characters’ lives. In other words: without context (created by specific details and examples) a particular moment can’t “turn,” and the characters’ lives would have continued the same linear path in the “before.” 

The importance of using specific examples and sensory-rich details to create context as a better way of connecting with your audience holds true regardless if you’re writing or speaking, freewriting on your own or working on research paper. Here’s a great quote from a business communications book, The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane, about the importance of sensory-rich details when speaking:

A picture is worth a thousand words, indeed—and for good reason. Image generation has a powerful impact on emotions and physiological states and a high impact on brain function. Our brain’s language-processing abilities are much newer and less deeply wired than are our visual-processing abilities. When you speak in words, the brain has to relate the words to concepts, then translate the concepts into images, which is what actually gets understood. Why not speak directly in the brain’s own language? Whenever you can, choose to speak in pictures. You’ll have a much greater impact, and your message will be far more memorable.

Here, Fox Cabane builds on similar ideas that our class has discussed before: the importance of using specific examples and choosing particular details in order to better communicate to your audience. I also wrote about the importance of specific examples when writing about art, particularly when explaining cause and effect, in this post.

Now someone might be thinking, who cares if I use specific details when I write? How will that help me any other time than when I write during Seminar 1? What if someone intends to be a doctor — they might be thinking, “Does it really matter if a doctor can create context for a patient?” According to a recently-published personal essay “A Letter to the Doctors and Nurses Who Cared for My Wife” written by Peter DeMarco, whose wife, Laura, died after a fatal asthma attack, yes, it does matter if doctors can create context when communicating: 

As I begin to tell my friends and family about the seven days you treated my wife, Laura Levis, in what turned out to be the last days of her young life, they stop me at about the 15th name that I recall. The list includes the doctors, nurses, respiratory specialists, social workers, even cleaning staff members who cared for her.
….
You cared so greatly for her parents, helping them climb into the room’s awkward recliner, fetching them fresh water almost by the hour, and by answering every one of their medical questions with incredible patience. My father-in-law, a doctor himself as you learned, felt he was involved in her care. I can’t tell you how important that was to him.

Answering questions is another way of creating context. Answering “Why are you pursuing XYZ treatment instead of ABC?” requires medical knowledge, yes; it also requires the ability to explain medical treatment using specific examples and details in such a manner that a dying patient’s father felt some measure of comfort.

In this post, I’ve discussed the idea of a turning point as one that can only be understood by using specific examples, and to do so have drawn on our classroom discussions, moments from pop culture, a book about communication, and a recently-published personal essay. Each example was chosen for different reasons:

• a classroom discussion that sets the stage for the topic of this post, and also builds on common ground with my audience;
• pop culture stories that I assumed would be familiar to my audience, therefore causing them to rethink of familiar stories with a new lens, that of the turning point, and creating a before/after in order for a moment to function as a turning point;
• a book about improving communication in business situations in order to demonstrate that the lessons from Prof. Natov’s classroom discussion apply to other forms of communication – such as speaking – and therefore taught in other fields and disciplines;
• an excerpt from a personal essay to demonstrate creating context can occur in the form of answering questions, and doing so may have an impact that one wouldn’t otherwise realize.

If I had simply defined the turning point as a concept and restated “using details and specific examples are important,” perhaps that would have been enough. I’m not convinced that I would have explained the importance of context, the ways you might already have been familiar with it, and how it would be beneficial in situations outside of Seminar 1.

It’s not easy to choose examples and writing is hard so I’ve been sitting on this post for a while to think about how I wanted to write it, what examples to choose, and how I might say something you’ve already heard (use specific details and examples) in such a way that it might resonate differently. I’m not sure this post even has a turning point in it, which is why I used so many different examples.

Now I’d like to hear from you – feel free to comment below!

• In what ways do the first books in the Harry Potter and Hunger Games series create context for those iconic lines to represent “turning points” in those narratives?
• Can you think back to the three examples that you chose in class and pick one moment to add additional details, specific examples, and explanations so the “turn” of the turning point has more of an impact?
• Is there a turning point to this post? Are there any parts that, with some additional details or examples, might create a turning point?