AEE 2401: How to Be a More Interesting Storyteller in English
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This is an All Ears English podcast, episode 2401, How to Be a More Interesting Storyteller in English. ♪

Welcome to the All Ears English podcast, downloaded more than 200 million times. Are you feeling stuck with your English? We'll show you how to become fearless and fluent by focusing on connection, not perfection with your American host, Aubrey Carter, the IELTS whiz.

and Lindsay McMahon, the English adventurer, coming to you from Arizona and Colorado, USA. To get real-time transcripts right on your phone and create your personalized vocabulary list, try the All Ears English app for iOS and Android. Start your seven-day free trial at allearsenglish.com forward slash app.

Are you good at telling stories in English? Today, find out why anyone can tell a great story in English if they add reported speech and use the right grammar, vocabulary, and intonation. Find out how today. This episode is brought to you by State Farm.

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Hello, Aubrey. How are you today? I'm great, Lindsay. How are you? Good. Aubrey, has anything funny happened to you lately?

Yes, just this morning. So today is April Fool's Day, April 1st. We record a little early. And this morning, my son, before I even realized it was April Fool's Day, I had made these chocolate croissants. Well, Trader Joe's made them, but I baked them and there were only four. So I told my kids, if you get up and get ready for school quick, come down and you can have a whole croissant. If not, I'm going to eat half of it.

And my son was like, mom, you can have half of mine. And I was like, oh, that's so sweet. And then he said, April Fool's. And I was like, oh, that's a good one. Oh, that is a good one. Good one. Really good April Fool's show. Yes. I did not see it coming. Yes.

And I love how you brought us into your morning, you know, your April Fool's morning in your kitchen, right? By using a little bit of reported speech there. That was interesting. Exactly. Yes. You guys probably noted it.

We do this in English when we're telling a story. We often will report dialogue and thoughts, but we're not saying things word for word. We use specific phrases and we change our intonation to bring people in to make it engaging and interesting. We recently promised a follow-up on this when it came up on an episode of the podcast.

Yes, I love it. I love it. Guys, go ahead and hit the follow button so you don't miss any of our episodes here on All Ears English. A lot of times episodes connect to each other and you don't want to miss any of them to get the full teaching, right? To get exactly what you need to connect with native speakers. All right. Exactly. Right. So first of all, just how important narrating thoughts and speech is, right? This is B2C1 skill.

But you have to practice it. You have to be thinking about it so that you're not sort of being formal and saying like, I said this and then they said this. That's not what you want to do. You want to add interest and engagement. I love that. And this is a skill that we explicitly teach, I know, at least in the C1 course, right, Aubrey? In our C1 Fluency course?

Yeah. Yes. And then we see the assignments where students are doing it and then they're using it in open conversation club. They sound so native and natural when they're doing that. I love it. Yes. I love it. Guys, go over to allersenglish.com slash C1 to get into the C1 course to explicitly build this skill, right? We give you the step-by-step and lots of practice inside the course, but today we're just touching on it just a little bit.

All right. Exactly. I'm just kind of showing how it works. It makes stories more interesting. It brings the listener in as if they were there, as if they experienced it with you. But intonation really matters. The phrasing you use really matters. So we're going to give a few examples today. This will be really funny, fun. Lindsay and I both prepared a couple of very short stories of

or weird things that have happened to us in the past. We're going to use this and then we'll point out some of the, of this speech narration of this reported speech and thoughts that we use. Yes. I like the term weird and wacky. Weird and wacky. The weird and the wacky. Here we go.

Yeah. So this past weekend, Aubrey, I was in Venice Beach, California with my family and we decided we know LA, but we could know Venice Beach more. So we thought, let's do a food tour. So we did the food tour. We toured the canals. We ate burgers and Asahi bowls, all the California Venice Beach things. And we come to the end of the tour and I'm thinking, okay, you know, this has been a great tour, but not much has happened. All of a sudden I look across the street and there's Billie Eilish, who I'm not a

big Billie Eilish person, but she was there. She's walking down the street and there are people following her saying, I love you, Billie. Right. And I thought nothing else weird or strange or interesting could possibly happen today. And then I turn my head as I'm eating my ice cream at the end. And there's a guy with a chicken on his lap in jeans. The chicken is in blue jeans.

I looked at the tour guide. I said, that's crazy. She tried to snap a photo. But even weirder, the owner of the chicken refused to let her take a photo. He actually got upset with her. And that is just the vibe of Venice Beach. There's weird, wacky things going on. But people are also strange in Venice Beach. So I thought I'm definitely coming back here soon. I love that story so much. I'm so happy we're doing this episode because I had not heard that story. And that is so funny. Yeah.

But you guys have got to listen back if you missed it. Lindsay used several reported speech and thoughts. And then I thought, nothing else weird is going to happen today. And then what you said to the tour guide, right? I said, what is happening? This is how you brought.

me and all of our listeners into the story, I felt like I was there at Venice Beach with you while looking at this chicken in blue jeans. You know, I passed off Venice Beach just to be kind of, it's a little like rough around the edges, Venice Beach. And I thought, oh, you know, it's okay. I know Venice Beach. But then

I had a chance to really dive deeper into Venice Beach and I recommend it. I recommend getting into it. If you're, if you're next time you're in LA, interesting place with a lot of cool history. Take your rollerblades. I rollerbladed in Venice Beach. It was so fun. There are characters there. I loved it. Aubrey, did you rollerblade in Venice Beach in the first wave of blade blading or the second wave?

Because... I'm not sure. It was, let me say, it was probably like 1997. Oh, first wave then. First wave. First wave? Okay. I don't know. Okay. Okay. Because, you know, it was popular in the 90s and then it came back, right? Yes. I was the OG rollerblader. Same here. Same here. I remember in high school, but

But I'm excited to hear your story and let's see what kind of reported speech we get here. Yes. Okay. This happened when I was 18. I was working in Jackson Hole for the summer and we had gone to a party in Driggs over a mountain pass and we were headed back to Jackson at like 2:00 AM.

And there were four of us in the car. We're driving and it got extremely foggy on the mountain. And we had to go so slowly because if we didn't, the drop off of the cliff is right there. We would just drive right off the mountain. So we're going like two miles an hour. My friends are like, can we go faster, please? And we're like, no, we can't.

All of a sudden out of the fog comes this woman. She had blood all down her shirt, hitting the passenger side window and screaming, um,

we all screamed we were like what is happening are we in a horror movie it turned out that she had been in an accident and she had been you know injured we stopped and let her in and it was so crazy like I was really in uh you know five nights at Freddy's I don't know a scary movie have something like in real life yes we were just like are we taking crazy crazy pills this is real life this

I love that. It reminds me of, it gives me kind of scream vibes or scary movie vibes, right? High school kids kind of getting into trouble. I've seen things like that in the movies, but not in real life. That was the only time something like that's ever happened. It was crazy. Oh my gosh. And I love the reported speech that you use. The trend I'm hearing is that we use a lot of we're like, we were just like, and we're

And that is a way that we pull people in. We ask our students in the course to do that too. We ask them to submit their reported speech in the community, right, Aubrey? And we hear a lot of that. We were like, I was like, we're just like, right? Yes. And you have other options. You could say, I thought...

You could say I said, even if you're not quoting yourself exactly and we'll say I was all. I was all. I was all. Oh my goodness, right? These are all the different phrases, speech markers that you can use that really draw someone into the story. And even if you said, I said, we know it's not going to be word for word. We're just reporting speech generally. Yes, I love that. You also said, what is happening? I think you said, I thought, what is happening? Yes.

Right. I do this. We were like, what is happening? And I think we actually taught that in a recent episode on All Ears English just a few weeks ago, Aubrey. I think you and I taught that. Yes, a lot of these phrases. What is happening? Am I taking crazy pills? Is this real life? A few of those that I used are in a recent episode. Scroll back if you missed it and hit follow if you're missing these great episodes. I love it. Shall we go for another round? Shall we do it? Yes, Lindsay, let's hear one of your other stories.

All right, Aubrey. So here we go. So we'll bring our listeners back to 2017. I was hiking the Inca Trail with my partner. It had been a four-day hike and we were camping at about 11,000 feet with a small group of about five of us on a tour, a hiking tour where you carry everything, all that good stuff. So we camped at about 11,000 feet and everything felt normal. You know, I didn't feel dizzy or anything, but as soon as I wake up in the morning and

I feel my rings feel a little tight, right? Something weird is going on. My rings feel tight. Something doesn't feel quite right, but I just brush it off and I think, oh, no big deal. Let's go have breakfast. So I get out of the tent and I walk down to where the coffee's brewing and the fire's going and people are like, whoa, who are you? What happened to your face? What happened to your face? It turns out my face had gotten super swollen and

And I tried to look in whatever mirror I could find. And I was like, oh, my gosh, who am I? And I can actually show you for our YouTube listeners what my face looked like. And can you see that, Aubrey? Oh, my goodness, Lindsay. This was me in the morning. You guys have to go and watch YouTube.

I cannot believe that's you. And I thought to myself, was it the wine? Because the night before we had been up drinking wine with this couple from, I think from Brazil and the olives, wine and olives. And I thought must've been the wine and olives, the salt. I'm not sure, but

I was looking like another person. It was wild, Aubrey. Yeah. Did you find out what caused it? Was it allergies? I don't really know. It was some kind of edema. It was some kind of swelling, I figured, from the altitude. But it took a few days to go down. Wow.

Yeah. It took a few days to go down. So I looked like that for a couple of days. It was crazy. Yeah. Oh my goodness. And wow, you really did bring us into the story when you, it was reported speech of what people first were saying and thinking when they saw you, right? People were like, what happened to your face? Yeah.

And if you think about the other ways you could say this, if you just say like, people saw me and were surprised to see my face looking like that. Not as interesting, right? Not as interesting the way you say it when you report speech and thoughts. It's to bring people in, to make it more interesting, to make them feel like they were there. And it does that. Yes. It's so funny. It's the same material. It's the same event. But the way we tell it really matters. Yeah.

Right? Totally. Yes, it does. And you want to be a good storyteller. This is one of the most important things about learning a language. I feel like I'm so close or maybe just barely there in Spanish and it's so fun that I could tell a story.

I love it. All right. Do you want to tell one more story? I have one more quick one. Okay. So when I was in college, we were at a park at like 9.40 PM, just hanging out. And the second it hit 10 PM, all these cop cars show up and just gave us all trespassing violations. We were like, are you serious? What did we do? We had no idea.

Turns out the park closes at 10 and people had been graffitiing the week before. So they had just decided right at 10, anyone who's here is getting a trespassing violation. It was a misdemeanor. And we were all like 19-year-old kids doing nothing. We were just sitting on like the playground equipment. And at 10 p.m., that's not even late. It was the craziest thing. We were all mind boggled and we were like calling parents, Mom, what do I do? Oops.

Oh, my God. I love how in that story you quoted your call with your mom. You know what I mean? Totally. You really brought me into it. Right. And I also heard we were like, are you serious? And your tone of voice really changed there. Yeah.

Right. It brought me in. And I can't believe you got a misdemeanor. I know. It was crazy. Luckily, I was my friend who also got this misdemeanor. Her uncle was a lawyer and he got us what's called a plea in abeyance, which they'll often give to young people who really weren't doing anything wrong. And it's six months of probation. And if nothing happens, that...

you know, you don't get in any trouble, not even a speeding ticket for six months, then it goes away and they like wipe it off your record. And so luckily I was able to do that. So the misdemeanor was clearing off my record. And I bet you were driving hundreds of miles.

speed limit. I was like being so careful because I really didn't want I was so crazy. So oh my gosh, that's crazy. I love it. Four great stories. But honestly, the fact is here, Aubrey, we don't need to be comedians. We don't need to have this wild, crazy life to be interesting.

I think that's my takeaway. These are stories that could happen to anyone, right? It wasn't that hilarious, but interesting, right? You can tell these stories in a very interesting way. And I have definitely listened to a story from someone who had something happen to them that was more interesting than the four stories we told. But if they're not using reported speech and they're kind of being boring about it, it doesn't feel as interesting. It was like, eh, it's not that exciting. It's like a waste of material.

Right. It's a waste of your life and opportunity. Yes. I love it. So good. All right. I have learned after so many years as an entrepreneur that speed matters when it comes to hiring, but so does quality. You need the most qualified person on your team fast. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites.

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Okay, Aubrey, we are back. Let's get into a role play now to show our listeners another example. Yes. And this actually happened and it happened while I was doing the plea in advance. So I was like on probation and I was really being very careful so that when this happened, I was like, what is happening? No, I... Okay, we're getting to that. I'll give you a little context here. Okay.

But this is how it can happen more as a conversation. It doesn't have to be a story one person's telling. I'm still telling a story, but sometimes there's a little more back and forth with it, which is also fun. I love that angle. All right, let's see what this looks like. All right, I'll start us out.

I was almost arrested once at the Salt Lake City Airport. It was crazy. Are you serious? What happened? We were just minding our business waiting for a friend's flight to land and this woman yells, "Security!" And a security guard comes over. What? Comes over to you? Yes. And we were all, "What is happening?" I bet. Why did they call them over?

Well, apparently my friend was absentmindedly peeling the paint on the window frame. And this lady was like, arrest these girls for destruction of property. And we were like, are you serious? This is nuts. What happened? The security guard called over a manager who was like, no, this paint was already peeling. Our friend's flight landed and she arrived in the middle of it and was like, what is going on? That is so bonkers, Aubrey. Yeah.

yes, this lady was bananas. She was like, I can't believe you're going to let these girls get away with this. And we were just like, okay, lady, like she needs a hobby. Everyone needs a hobby. Yes. Yes. Wow. Okay. And that was during the six month period, which made it so much worse. I was like, no, no, please. I left

her, like fed her to the wolves, threw her under the bus and ran. I wouldn't have left the house after that happened, right? I mean, something's going on. I mean, we're picking up a friend at the airport, minding your own business. I didn't even notice, but she was just kind of like picking at the paint that was peeling in the window. Imagine. I mean, sometimes you can absentmindedly be doing something, right? Not even thinking about it. You have nervous habits, maybe. Yeah. Destruction of property. Really? What? Yeah.

Wow. So what did we use here? What did you use here to report the event? Yeah. So the first instance is when I talk about what this woman said. I said, this woman yells, security.

already. And then the guards come over and then I say, we were all, what is happening? So there are options. I could say we were like, what is happening? Or we thought, what is happening? Lots of options. We might stick in just and say, we were just like, what is happening? And I want our listeners to notice that there are times here where we move into the present tense.

This is not what today's episode is about, using the present tense in reported speech, but we do do it. Right, Aubrey? We'll talk about that another day. Yes, that would be another good episode that when we're telling a story, we'll move from past to present because we're bringing the person into the story. And once they're there, we start using present tense as if it's happening as we speak. But then we also seamlessly move back into the past tense sometimes and then back into the present. So it's really dynamic. Totally. Yeah.

And then I said, this lady was like, arrest these girls for destruction of property, which is maybe not exactly what she said. But, you know, basically, report a speech. More or less. It's okay to embellish a little bit. Are you serious? Yeah. So, yeah, we do exaggerate. We embellish. It makes the story more interesting. But this is basically what was said. It was crazy.

Yeah. And then you said the security guard called over a manager who was like, no, this paint was already peeling. Okay. So again, more, he was like, right. He said, essentially it means he said. Okay. Exactly. And then our friend's fight landed. Our friend arrives and was like, what is going on? And this might have just been her face. She probably didn't say anything, but she like would walk up.

and see like this lady yelling and security guards and we're there and she just probably would have this look on her face like what is going on that is huge oh this has been a really fun episode today with four great stories plus a great role play aubry you know what is the main point where do we want to leave our listeners today yeah just

stories can be so fun and interesting, but reported speech and thoughts really improve stories a thousand fold. They can be kind of boring and blah and be kind of flat and not land. But if you're practicing the intonation, notice our intonation and using these phrases, I was all, I thought I was like, then you can really tell engaging stories. Yeah. And it's fun. You can get in that clearly

if you're telling this story, this experience meant something to you. So for people to know you better and to understand who you are as a person, right, you need to pull them in, but they need to listen and want to listen. So this is how we do it. Absolutely. Yes, exactly. Oh, I'm excited for you guys to tell a story and use reported speech. So all right. Great stuff today, Aubrey. We'll see you on the next episode. See you next time. All right. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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