The author uses a one-sentence writing style ubiquitous in "long-form" ad copy.
You say one thing.
Then another.
And another.
See how it hooks you?
And makes you want to read further?
Me neither. But apparently it "works" very well.
You just gotta tell a good story
11–20 of 75 posts
Re: You just gotta tell a good story
#12I prefer a good bullet tree that breaks down an idea.
This is just my opinion, but I'm sick of stories and other long form content like youtube videos. They take way too long to communicate very little information and are full of ads.
Re: You just gotta tell a good story
#13The author uses a one-sentence writing style ubiquitous in "long-form" ad copy. You say one thing. Then another. And another. See how it hooks you? And makes you want to read further? Me neither. But apparently it "works" very well.
[deleted]
Re: You just gotta tell a good story
#14The other day I was aimlessly browsing through Youtube, and I found a video by a man named Ira Glass. I had never heard of him but apparently he's a famous NPR journalist. He told a story about how in English class he learned to start with a theses and then explain facts. But, in broadcasting, he learned that doesn't work.
Instead, you start with an anecdote - the purest form of a story. Ira pointed out that humans are naturally drawn to listen to stories, so by framing facts as a sequence of events, it gives them momentum that can make even the most boring of facts more interesting and engaging.
As I listened, he elucidated by talking about a man waking up and walking around his house. While nothing in his story happened, the way he told it was very suspenseful, which did make me much more curious as to what Ira was going to say next.
I think Ira makes a great point, and even if you are just trying to educate people on a topic matter, framing the facts you're trying to convey as a sequence of events makes it much more likely you will succeed at conveying the information you intend to.
Re: You just gotta tell a good story
#15The author uses a one-sentence writing style ubiquitous in "long-form" ad copy. You say one thing. Then another. And another. See how it hooks you? And makes you want to read further? Me neither. But apparently it "works" very well.
Totally anecdotal but a lot of people seem to really struggle reading long paragraphs these days. So yeah it probably works for those people.
Re: You just gotta tell a good story
#16This post’s writing markedly improved right when it started talking about teaching board games and dropped right when it stopped. I think it’s because the author’s passion for this anecdote about teaching board games distracted them from consciously applying that peculiar staccato style.
I don’t know the reason for the staccato style. Self-imposed onto their content because it’s good for engagement? A technique for generating content when they don’t have any? The linguistic analogue of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, brought on by repeated Twitter concussions?
Re: You just gotta tell a good story
#17You'll never believe this one weird old tip, but...
I don't think there was a story in this blogpost so much as a humblebrag about a never-fail technique for teaching board games. Certainly it had nothing on the craft of storytelling, which itself is dominated by marketing-message literature of this sort. The relationship between story and teaching is baldly asserted from authority and then never brought up again.
Re: You just gotta tell a good story
#18Aside: Was that blog post taken from Twitter? If not, Twitter has profoundly affected the way the author writes. Nearly every "paragraph" is a single sentence, and the longest of them is just 300 characters. I imagine it must be difficult to tell a story if you write it in a style where your paragraphs resemble bullet points! Perhaps, though, it might work if it's very dialog-heavy, and if the characters are noir-lac…
> Twitter has profoundly affected the way the author writes.
This is wild speculation.
Newspaper journalism has always tended toward paragraphs of one or two short sentences at most. It's a stylistic choice born partly out of the physical constraints of newspaper layouts, but it also makes articles easy to skim, and the information density tends to be high. This style has always been shared with news articles online, which don't have the same width constraints, but which do have similar considerations when it comes to be easy to skim.
Ultimately, paragraphs are just a tool for grouping that's bigger than a sentence. Writers should use whatever groupings makes sense for whatever they're writing. In this case, it seems to be just an expression of the writer's voice. That's probably how they talk in real life.
People like to find reasons to hate "things nowadays", but this isn't one of them.
Re: You just gotta tell a good story
#19Aside: Was that blog post taken from Twitter? If not, Twitter has profoundly affected the way the author writes. Nearly every "paragraph" is a single sentence, and the longest of them is just 300 characters. I imagine it must be difficult to tell a story if you write it in a style where your paragraphs resemble bullet points! Perhaps, though, it might work if it's very dialog-heavy, and if the characters are noir-lac…
If you read it aloud, I think it is very punchy. I’m guessing considering the authors pedigree that his writing style was a conscious choice.
Re: You just gotta tell a good story
#20The other day I was aimlessly browsing through Youtube, and I found a video by a man named Ira Glass. I had never heard of him but apparently he's a famous NPR journalist. He told a story about how in English class he learned to start with a theses and then explain facts. But, in broadcasting, he learned that doesn't work. Instead, you start with an anecdote - the purest form of a story. Ira pointed out that humans a…
Good link. Thank you.