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You just gotta tell a good story

kampheyapproved.medium.com

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Re: You just gotta tell a good story

#21

Post by ergonaught »

creakingstairs wrote: post #15
Octokiddie wrote: post #11

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.

Totally anecdotal but a lot of people seem to really struggle reading long paragraphs these days. So yeah it probably works for those people.

It doesn’t “work”; it helps you know what to skim and skip because of the already shallow engagement with the content.

It isn’t writing intended for an engaged audience, which is to say it isn’t writing. It’s just copy.

Re: You just gotta tell a good story

#22

Post by theturtletalks »

waprin wrote: post #14

The 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…

Plato said it best, "Those who tell stories rule society." The art of storytelling is inherent in all of us and a skill we should all try to master.

Re: You just gotta tell a good story

#24

Post by pshc »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #7

Aside: 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…

This writing style is more characteristic of LinkedIn to me.

Re: You just gotta tell a good story

#25

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #7

Aside: 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…

I used to write like that, because I worked for a Japanese company, and most of my stuff was translated.

Doing it that way, allowed the translator to write their translations inline, and it also helped me to “modularize” my thoughts; so each sentence was a fairly atomic thought.

Re: You just gotta tell a good story

#26

Post by yesenadam »

theturtletalks wrote: post #22
waprin wrote: post #14

The 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…

Plato said it best, "Those who tell stories rule society." The art of storytelling is inherent in all of us and a skill we should all try to master.

> Plato said it best, "Those who tell stories rule society."

Source? This quote appears in many places online, but never with any source, besides "attributed to Plato", or "as Plato once said" etc. Usually this means it's not something Plato said. The internet is full of fake Plato quotes.

I got to the 6th page of google results before seeing anything like a source, and followed that trail - "Leadership Manipulation and Ethics in Storytelling" by T Auvinen, 2013, cited 110 times, says "Even Plato stated that those who tell stories rule society (Fisher, 1985)". So I looked at that paper, WR Fisher's "The Narrative Paradigm: In the Beginning" (1985), which doesn't contain that quote or anything like it! It does say, in its one paragraph about Plato:

"[Plato's] “contribution” to the transformation of logos was to technologize it, to make it a term appropriate to only philosophical discourse. The effects of his thought were to create “experts” in truth, knowledge, and reality; to establish the rational superiority of philosophical (technical) discourse; to relegate mythos to myth (meaning fictional); and to downgrade rhetoric and poetic. Dispensations were made for rhetoric and poetic; they had a place in the life of the community but they were not to be considered serious intellectual arts. They were to be controlled or informed by philosopher-kings."

Which is vaguely in the right ballpark - although more like its opposite. Tentative conclusion: Plato didn't say that.

Re: You just gotta tell a good story

#27

Post by zharknado »

Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction is a solid, relatively easy-to-understand framework for getting better at helping people learn. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Principles_of_Instruct...

For extra credit, self-determination theory is a fantastic and relatively simple way to conceptualize how motivation affects learning.

Re: You just gotta tell a good story

#28

Post by throwaway14356 »

yesenadam wrote: post #26
theturtletalks wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plato said it best, "Those who tell stories rule society." The art of storytelling is inherent in all of us and a skill we should all try to master.

> Plato said it best, "Those who tell stories rule society." Source? This quote appears in many places online, but never with any source, besides "attributed to Plato", or "as Plato once said" etc. Usually this means it's not something Plato said. The internet is full of fake Plato quotes. I got to the 6th page of google results before seeing anything like a source, and followed that trail - "Leadership Manipulation…

imho that story should have ended like:

"I didn't say that" - Plato

Re: You just gotta tell a good story

#29

Post by throwaway14356 »

I coin a code comment format long long ago. Over the many years that followed I've never bothered to coin a name for it, until today! I present to the world: Talented Comments!

It was late at night after spending a seemingly absurd amount of time in the coding zone. One of those winning steaks where one writes many walls of code that suspiciously lack the usual bugs and typos, draining one cup of coffee after the other... It struck me all of a sudden that very little remains of the developer after he leaves this world. All we have is the shining diamond but no collective recollection of the man who cut it. Thus Talented comments was born. It takes 3 stages, the first is a story, preferably about your early childhood, the second part is what you've learned that day (from the described experience) and the third and final stage explains to the future reader (even if it is obvious) how that lesson applies to the code below.

And then we wait, hopefully for a hundred years, for someone to find it.

Extra points if one can awkwardly name a function, class or variable to hook into the story. My gut says it will help with preservation.

Re: You just gotta tell a good story

#30

Post by brobinson »

pshc wrote: post #24
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #7

Aside: 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…

This writing style is more characteristic of LinkedIn to me.

Yeah, this is the "And that boy's name? Albert Eintein." writing style that was used by every SEO/SEM/growth hacker account up until recently. It feels dated now.

(Appropriate that it's on medium.com)

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