Getting away with it…

Check out This American Life episode 477: ‘Getting Away With It.’.

 

I listen to some of the stories of people being bad or doing something bad and getting away with it. Now I am not here to run on about what they were about, but more so to talk about how they told the stories. I noticed the speakers used repetition as they were telling their stories. By them repeating certain aspects of their story, as a listener, I remembered those parts more than other parts. Another techniques I heard during the short audio stories was replacement. For example, in the first short story about them man flying with the “knee defender”, he told the story about how he used it to prevent the lady in front of him to recline her seat back to protect his knees from being hit. He replaced the word knee defender with “it” over and over. In another story about the lady getting on a plane when she was younger when she wasn’t supposed to. The storyteller used very descriptive and powerful words. As she explained the story, she used specific details as well as sound effects and other sounds to create different voices for people and sounds for other objects in the story. She made the story very appealing as she made it apparent of what she was doing but not with a boring monotone voice or sound effects. I really like the way stories are made with sound effects in particular because without any images, sound effects can make a world of difference in a story.