Bob Dotson, Master Storyteller

On November 1st, Bob Dotson came to speak at Ball State. Bob currently works as a correspondent for NBC's Today Show. He went to Kansas for a a degree in journalism and political science and later went to Syracuse for a Master of Science degree in television and film. He has won over 100 awards for his work, including five Emmy Awards. Bob's talk was about how to be an effective story teller. What he tries to do in his work is to find ordinary people who have an extraordinary story to tell and then sharing that story. He has several ways of doing this. He starts by asking a non-question question. Basically, an open-ended, simple question for the interviewee to elaborate on. For example, Bob found out that the man who built the USS Arizona Memorial was once in an internment camp for immigrants during the Second World War. He found this out by asking a man if his father was still alive and what's his story. His other technique is to not ask a direct question. He recommends to just comment on someone's story to get them to further elaborate. He found out his father only had a second grade education yet had still founded an optics company just by saying, "that must have been tough" when his father described his childhood.