Vicky is not talking about the a story structure. If you followed a story structure, you start with how you've been (I always loved windows), then what happened (I got an automatic update), then piles of problems (The computer wouldn't start, lost some data, couldn't reinstall windows) then the solution (until I installed Linux) the moral (use Linux).
Vickys structure is sort of the opposite. Start with the most important part (You should use Linux), go deeper (for example Gnome, for desktop) or add surprise (it's very easy to install), open the conversation with a question (do you use Linux?) or close it with an answer (it doesn't have automatic updates).
That's why this blog post is kind of a mess, with conflicting ideas.
That's how newspaper articles are structured (the second part you mention), start off with the important bit (there was a car crash no one was hurt) then add more details as paragraphs proceed, if someone wants to know more they keep reading.
Of course the web has sort of ruined this, but I'm talking old school newspapers.
That's one annoying thing with modern articles. You have to wade through paragraphs and paragraphs of "John grew up a taxidermist's son and bla bla bla bla..." before you even get to what the article is supposed to be about.
Then you get a couple of on-topic sentences followed by another deluge of fluff.
Oldschool newspapers were great because space was at such a premium that this kind of garbage wouldn't happen.
Try reading a recipe for a simple chocolate cake. You get the author’s deep rooted trauma of being that weird kid shamed in HS for some reason as well as over sharing of political stances on the war in Ukraine ending with promoting penny stocks or some MLM pyramid scheme. FFS just give me ingredients and steps.
"We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell 'em stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe. So, I decided to go to Morganville - which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days nickels had pictures of bumble bees on 'em. Gimme five bees for a quarter, they'd say. Now where was I... Oh yeah! The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones."
Although people are talking about copyright, the real reason is SEO. If you write just the recipe, your site appears lower in the search results than those with all the fluff (or so it was believed).
Ask most of the people who write those recipes - they claim to hate writing all that fluff, and that's why all of them have a "Jump to recipe" link.
Recipes generally cannot be copyrighted. But the filler text, that definitely can be, and is. So if I wrap my recipe in a pointless anecdote, I make it that much harder for The Unscrupulous Gourmet to use a web scraper to steal my recipe.
I thought it started with the google algorithm rewarding more body text and high linger-time. Sites that just present info concisely are down ranked (then google extracts the concise info from long time-wasting sites and puts it directly on their search page—a whole thriving ecosystem of bullshit jobs, but at least now we can automate every part of that!)
The 'inverted pyramid' - in some ways, its value is emphasised by how we consume media these days. In others (dark patterns, attention economy), it's deliberately ignored.
A historian I know rants a lot about the fashion to write historic books in anything but chronological order.
There's a lot of machinery in our brains that automatically parse chronological stories for dependencies and correlations. If you break up the order you throw it all away and everything becomes manual. It makes it easier to force people to agree with your interpretation, nothing feels "off".
It's like writing sequential imperative code vs a bunch of callbacks. Pretty obvious what's easier to debug.
The second part is the structure I tell everyone to use in presentations - and yeah, its explicitly not narrative. I have a conclusion, so that goes up front - it's the most important part, it goes first. Then the second row rank of assumptions which support the conclusion go next, and only then do you start doing the background on how some of those are reached - if it matters.
I find it's as much a writing tool as it is useful for getting to the point quickly with presentations: the goal of presentation is not to surprise the audience, or have a clever twist. It's to be plain, open and honest.
(Which is to say, anytime you don't see this structure in any context other then fiction, you're probably being market pitched and what you see is fiction).
Most story structures start with exposition, i.e. the background info. However this is quite boring normally so to get you through that they often add a "hook". That's what's being suggested here. So normally a story is hook, exposition, conflict, resolution. That's what's being suggested here, just not very clearly.
In academic circles, the abstract is typically a summary, not a problem statement. The rest of the sections are usually read out of order, so it's actually not that different.
I found myself first agreeing with this, and then hating the examples used.
I think the part i liked boils down to: have a thesis and be very upfront on what it is. Everything you say should build up that thesis.
To a lesser extent, i also agree with the idea that presentations should (usually) have a narrative structure, but i wouldn't put it the same way they did.
But at the same time, when they started to go into examples, everything started to sound click-baity. "One important thing you have to know about X" just feels like a click-bait headline. It also kind of assumes that i want to know one thing about X. Maybe i would rather know zero things. The "why" is left unadressed.
> "One important thing you have to know about X" just feels like a click-bait headline. It also kind of assumes that i want to know one thing about X. Maybe i would rather know zero things. The "why" is left unadressed.
Agree that the phrasing feels a little clickbaity, but don't think it detracts too much.
There are scenarios that you can safely assume that someone does want to know about X — maybe you're presenting at a conference or giving a lecture; asked a "Tell us about a time when…" question in interview or, as in her example, you're giving a report about what your team did to senior managers.
> There are scenarios that you can safely assume that someone does want to know about X — maybe you're presenting at a conference or giving a lecture; asked a "Tell us about a time when…" question in interview or, as in her example, you're giving a report about what your team did to senior managers.
On the contrary, i think that is one of the biggest mistakes people make when talking at conferences. It is very important to justify why the audience should care about the specific aspect of the issue you are presenting on.
This comment seems misleading… The example used was “the one thing you must know about this topic is …”, and I would have agreed with this comment if they forgot the “is …” part.
There's a latent bias here that any audience can be engaged. That's simply not true. Some stories are told in a medium that is difficult for specific audiences to agree with (I'm thinking here of the difference between people who learn by listening, reading, doing), but some audiences just won't care about the story you're telling. You could be Tolkien himself, but if people you happen to be telling a story to aren't interested in fantasy, they won't engage.
Engagement is like dating: be attractive, don't be unattractive, and remember that it's a numbers game. "Be attractive" meaning, learn how to tell a good story. "Don't be unattractive" meaning, don't make stupid mistakes like not using a microphone and speaker in a large group, or hitting send at 7 PM on a Friday night. "Remember that it's a numbers game" meaning, don't spend all your energy on your first audience and get discouraged if they don't engage; just do you and tell your story to as many people as possible until you find those who do engage with you.
No, the "be attractive" of story-telling is, have a story that's worth telling.
The dark side of all this "how to tell a good story" stuff is teaching people how to suck up other people's attention on something that is fundamentally unworthy, like marketing drivel.
I was introduced to the STAR framework recently which lays it out like so : Situation > Task > Action > Result
Situation: I was asked by my wife if we should sail around the world for a few years.
Task: I agreed on the spot now we had to work hard towards looking for possible sail boats that could be our home for a few years and keep us safe while sailing.
Action: We travlled around the continent looking at boats, at the same time we saved up as much money we could. When we found a boat we bougt it, sold our house and lived on the boat. We took sailing and navigational classes and used a lot of time researching where in the world we wanted to go.
Result: We went sailing on May 17th 2023 and at the moment we are in the pacific helping environmental organisations de-plastic Hawaiian islands.
I found it being a good framework getting to the actual point!
This is near how I conduct business, as I cannot keep track of everything, nor can I have a non-stop scribe to note and catalog things.
AWS and several others use this in interviews.
I use STAR/SPAR:
[S]ituation or context
[T]ask or [P]roblem
[A]ction or solution
[R]esult or expected outcome
Basically, tell me the background, tell me the problem or thing that needs done, tell me all the ways it was reviewed, and the actual picked solution or action, and finally what is the expected outcome or result. As an exec I can be a stateless machine and with that set of details, I can make a decision.
Sometimes I dig into it a bit to see if proper due diligence was done, if there is real info & data is present, but once I am comfortable that the person distills it properly, it is a no brainer decision. I can say, "yes, go forth with your action/solution" or "no, because XYZ, go back and consider that" (usually from the T/PA/R areas).
There might be a way to craft this for story telling, after all, most things are stories.
Almost two decades ago now, I came across a PUA book where the author emphasized the importance of telling good stories, along with some good practical tips on how to structure.
I’ve used them regularly to great success. I tried to give this advice to some of my friends for interviews who followed STAR method a bit too rigidly. It didn’t work out…but over time they organically became better story tellers through practice.
This is a large tangent, but the post gives good business communication tips. I wrote a more succinct guide for my team, but I think I’ll share this too. Our company suffers from slack disease, so stuff like this can really help.
Sounds interesting, which book was it? Im looking for more practical ways to improve communication despite the PUA label. Although you can find many similarities between dates and interviews heh
My recommendations are On Writing Well and Made to Stick for texts. As for verbal communication, “How to win friends and influence people” helps with the cues and motivations.
For sure. I work as a freelancer, and I think there is an awful lot of similarity between dating and engaging new clients. Fundamentally, both sides are thinking "do I want to spend more time with this person", in addition to what they concretely offer.
Something great I've specifically witnessed yesterday: when doing a small request, like ask for a feature request in the team channel, don't just describe a small use case.
Instead, provide the bigger picture: e.g. "I'm currently trying to climb that benchmark, I'm close to the top and only need a few % points that I could get with this new feature"
For me it worked wonders: a PR that I had been awaiting for some time was done overnight by an enthusiastic and helpful coworker!
The only thing one should care about is to speak in your own voice. All these MBA cookie cutter slide deck presentation styles that introduce phrases or 3 part structures just mean you're on autopilot. I find nothing more off-putting than hearing someone give a talk and you can precisely pinpoint where they just start to borrow phrases or go down some generic list of items.
In my opinion that misses out on some critical steps:
1) Think about the purpose of the communication, the goals. 2) Consider the audience, their background and communication preferences
the problem with focusing on the audience is that we're in an age where people are already over-obsessed with reception, it's no accident that the title of this post starts with "Engage your audience..." and deals almost exclusively with structure and how to say things rather than substance. Much more interesting these days to look for people who write for themselves and take an audience as it comes rather than trying to optimize for engagement.
"Engage your audience" is meaningless without a specific goal and audience analysis, imo.
Goal:
Is the goal to convince someone of an idea? Teach them a skill? Or sell them a product?
Goal implications:
What would be required to say sell them a product, right there and then? What level of trust is needed? What concerns would need to be cleared? How small or big could such a purchase be?
Audience background: Who will be there to listen to the message? Or - which venues can we find the relevant audience? Which subset of the readers/listeners do we actually _target_ with our messaging? What kind of personas do they trust/distrust? Are they most stimulated by intellectual or emotional appeal? What does it take for them to make an action - to get out of their chair (generally)? What does it take for them to buy a product (or goal)?
Now one is maybe close to start thinking about what to say and how to say it...
It depends on what you are talking about, but i actually think the hero's journey is actually a good framework for many (not all) technical talks. [I agree the blog post did a poor job selling it]
A lot of technical talks are essentially a story on how you (or your team/company/whatever) solved some problem. Essentially you are the hero, and you are regailing everyone with the tale of how you solved some technical problem. That naturally forms a sort of narrative story, that isn't that different from fictional stories where the hero's peaceful life is interupted by some call to action, go through some hardships, and eventually slay the dragon.
For one the hero's journey includes resenting the call to action.
That makes the hero relatable but is not a strategy you can always easily include in a corporate technical talk.
"Just buy more of last year's product and let me enjoy my vacation, but no, you needed more features!"
If you're horrible at communicating it'll help as it forces you to simplify yourself as a character of simple motivations but it's not a recipe for success or attention or quality content, especially when you kill most of what people found interesting about the Iliad/Odyssey as theatre plays: Violence, Sex, Death, Love, Hate.
Death/Rebirth moment would best be embodied as a massive failure and some positions don't allow that kind of honesty or framing without risking your job, although it would indeed be more interesting.
The hero's journey is a bread and butter narrative from stage plays from 8th century BC. I'm of the belief that the structure is useless and what engages us are the emotions at display.
Even act structures are just an excuse so actors can change clothes during the play - there's no divine insight about writing there.
> For one the hero's journey includes resenting the call to action.
Which is super common in tech talks.
Tech talks often have the form: there is some legacy solution we tried really hard to make work, but eventually we realized that despite all the hacks to make it work for us, it simply wasn't viable so we did something else.
You’re right. But people fails often to define the characters, build the scene, and structure the plot. I’ve been reading some of the books from “Write Great Fiction” series [0] and you can apply the advices to nonfiction too.
I hate when something tries to sell me a framework, like, following the "stories in 8 steps" for making concise points, because obviously the question that follows is: Why 8? Why not 7 or 9?
If that's just an opinion then I'd rather have it backed by something more than "it worked for you"
Did it work for you despite this, or thanks to this?
Would somebody else's 9 step program work better?
Did somebody distill it down to some other more elegant principles that you just happened to follow by doing the 8-step thing?
There's never anything rigorous in the realm of marketing & communication courses
Suggested: "Survey output indicates main root cause of churn is awareness of better value for money offering."
My suggestion depending on the context would be: "Survey: we're too expensive" or "Survey: churn due to cheaper alternatives" which will be read by 5x more people.
This all seems quite ... familiar. I feel like it's basic common sense. Almost all of my writing and presentation classes -all the way back to grade school- have advocated this kind of thing.
I realised recently that many of the posts I see on social media that have the highest engagement achieve it through...ambiguity. People interpret the thing differently, then argue about their understanding, creating "engagement". Often the ambiguity isn't even intentional, it's just vague communication.
"Strategic ambiguity" can help a political party capture more voters than they otherwise would for similar reasons. Useful because it gives flexibility in decision-making and helps in managing different expectations without committing to a specific course of action. By being vague, leaders can avoid conflicts and keep their options open, allowing them to adapt to changing situations and negotiate better outcomes. Effective in diplomacy and business, where clear, direct statements might limit possibilities or provoke opposition.
The post isn't saying that though. It's saying that presentation is important _too_ (which is most definitely is). I think a lot of people can relate to "I did good work, why is it not landing well?"
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
But what if my interpretation of 'engagement' (and 'content creation' while we're at it) excludes good faith?
The way I see it, 'content creation' is all about quantity not quality or having any message/goal.
And 'engagement' is about getting people to react emotionally (doesn't matter if positively or negatively) to get them to spam your 'content' to others.
The problem with any hard formula like this is: people twig onto it. When your presentation looks exactly like everyone else's, you've already lost, because you're boring.
When Sting was being interviewed by Rick Beato, he said that when he listens to a new song, if he isn't surprised by something real quick, he loses interest.
"If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. Oh wait! Everyone IS doing it."
Vickys structure is sort of the opposite. Start with the most important part (You should use Linux), go deeper (for example Gnome, for desktop) or add surprise (it's very easy to install), open the conversation with a question (do you use Linux?) or close it with an answer (it doesn't have automatic updates).
That's why this blog post is kind of a mess, with conflicting ideas.
Of course the web has sort of ruined this, but I'm talking old school newspapers.
Then you get a couple of on-topic sentences followed by another deluge of fluff.
Oldschool newspapers were great because space was at such a premium that this kind of garbage wouldn't happen.
- Abe Simpson
Ask most of the people who write those recipes - they claim to hate writing all that fluff, and that's why all of them have a "Jump to recipe" link.
See this, for example: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-explains-how-it-r...
The commonly believed reason is that a simple list of ingredients and steps would not be copyrightable. So they add fluff which can be copyrighted.
There's a lot of machinery in our brains that automatically parse chronological stories for dependencies and correlations. If you break up the order you throw it all away and everything becomes manual. It makes it easier to force people to agree with your interpretation, nothing feels "off".
It's like writing sequential imperative code vs a bunch of callbacks. Pretty obvious what's easier to debug.
I find it's as much a writing tool as it is useful for getting to the point quickly with presentations: the goal of presentation is not to surprise the audience, or have a clever twist. It's to be plain, open and honest.
(Which is to say, anytime you don't see this structure in any context other then fiction, you're probably being market pitched and what you see is fiction).
Sometimes it is.
>you're probably being market pitched and what you see is fiction
Sometimes you are being market pitched.
It's all Steve Jobs did yet he's the classic example of good Power Point presentations.
- Summary - Conclusion - Results - Analysis - Hypothesis - Context - Context
There is the ideal form for Researchers:
- Problem Statement (Abstract) - Context - Context - Hypothesis - Analysis - Results - Conclusion
Almost opposite ordering
I think the part i liked boils down to: have a thesis and be very upfront on what it is. Everything you say should build up that thesis.
To a lesser extent, i also agree with the idea that presentations should (usually) have a narrative structure, but i wouldn't put it the same way they did.
But at the same time, when they started to go into examples, everything started to sound click-baity. "One important thing you have to know about X" just feels like a click-bait headline. It also kind of assumes that i want to know one thing about X. Maybe i would rather know zero things. The "why" is left unadressed.
Agree that the phrasing feels a little clickbaity, but don't think it detracts too much.
There are scenarios that you can safely assume that someone does want to know about X — maybe you're presenting at a conference or giving a lecture; asked a "Tell us about a time when…" question in interview or, as in her example, you're giving a report about what your team did to senior managers.
On the contrary, i think that is one of the biggest mistakes people make when talking at conferences. It is very important to justify why the audience should care about the specific aspect of the issue you are presenting on.
"X important things you have to know about Y. Number N will surprise you!"
Engagement is like dating: be attractive, don't be unattractive, and remember that it's a numbers game. "Be attractive" meaning, learn how to tell a good story. "Don't be unattractive" meaning, don't make stupid mistakes like not using a microphone and speaker in a large group, or hitting send at 7 PM on a Friday night. "Remember that it's a numbers game" meaning, don't spend all your energy on your first audience and get discouraged if they don't engage; just do you and tell your story to as many people as possible until you find those who do engage with you.
The dark side of all this "how to tell a good story" stuff is teaching people how to suck up other people's attention on something that is fundamentally unworthy, like marketing drivel.
It's Darwinism at play not an attempt at science.
Situation: I was asked by my wife if we should sail around the world for a few years.
Task: I agreed on the spot now we had to work hard towards looking for possible sail boats that could be our home for a few years and keep us safe while sailing.
Action: We travlled around the continent looking at boats, at the same time we saved up as much money we could. When we found a boat we bougt it, sold our house and lived on the boat. We took sailing and navigational classes and used a lot of time researching where in the world we wanted to go.
Result: We went sailing on May 17th 2023 and at the moment we are in the pacific helping environmental organisations de-plastic Hawaiian islands.
I found it being a good framework getting to the actual point!
AWS and several others use this in interviews.
I use STAR/SPAR:
[S]ituation or context
[T]ask or [P]roblem
[A]ction or solution
[R]esult or expected outcome
Basically, tell me the background, tell me the problem or thing that needs done, tell me all the ways it was reviewed, and the actual picked solution or action, and finally what is the expected outcome or result. As an exec I can be a stateless machine and with that set of details, I can make a decision.
Sometimes I dig into it a bit to see if proper due diligence was done, if there is real info & data is present, but once I am comfortable that the person distills it properly, it is a no brainer decision. I can say, "yes, go forth with your action/solution" or "no, because XYZ, go back and consider that" (usually from the T/PA/R areas).
There might be a way to craft this for story telling, after all, most things are stories.
The most powerful example would be a meta video that explains the concept within its own content.
Like the acronym GNU (Gnu's Not Unix).
I’ve used them regularly to great success. I tried to give this advice to some of my friends for interviews who followed STAR method a bit too rigidly. It didn’t work out…but over time they organically became better story tellers through practice.
This is a large tangent, but the post gives good business communication tips. I wrote a more succinct guide for my team, but I think I’ll share this too. Our company suffers from slack disease, so stuff like this can really help.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickup_artist
Situation Task Action Result
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_task,_action,_res...
Instead, provide the bigger picture: e.g. "I'm currently trying to climb that benchmark, I'm close to the top and only need a few % points that I could get with this new feature"
For me it worked wonders: a PR that I had been awaiting for some time was done overnight by an enthusiastic and helpful coworker!
The hero's journey is not good Framework for a technical talk.
Be interesting, create a hook, what do you find interesting? What style draws you in? Emulate that, then branch off.
Conversation is a lot more complex and depends on reaction, audience, expertize. Every verbal interaction is a lot like writing.
If you're gonna read a book about it it should be How to Make Friends and and Influence People.
Corny title but a timeless working strategy for communication.
On Writing by Stephen King is fine too but tldr; be honest.
A lot of technical talks are essentially a story on how you (or your team/company/whatever) solved some problem. Essentially you are the hero, and you are regailing everyone with the tale of how you solved some technical problem. That naturally forms a sort of narrative story, that isn't that different from fictional stories where the hero's peaceful life is interupted by some call to action, go through some hardships, and eventually slay the dragon.
That makes the hero relatable but is not a strategy you can always easily include in a corporate technical talk.
"Just buy more of last year's product and let me enjoy my vacation, but no, you needed more features!"
If you're horrible at communicating it'll help as it forces you to simplify yourself as a character of simple motivations but it's not a recipe for success or attention or quality content, especially when you kill most of what people found interesting about the Iliad/Odyssey as theatre plays: Violence, Sex, Death, Love, Hate.
Death/Rebirth moment would best be embodied as a massive failure and some positions don't allow that kind of honesty or framing without risking your job, although it would indeed be more interesting.
The hero's journey is a bread and butter narrative from stage plays from 8th century BC. I'm of the belief that the structure is useless and what engages us are the emotions at display.
Even act structures are just an excuse so actors can change clothes during the play - there's no divine insight about writing there.
Which is super common in tech talks.
Tech talks often have the form: there is some legacy solution we tried really hard to make work, but eventually we realized that despite all the hacks to make it work for us, it simply wasn't viable so we did something else.
[0]: https://www.writersdigest.com/wd-books/wgf-plot-structure
If that's just an opinion then I'd rather have it backed by something more than "it worked for you"
Did it work for you despite this, or thanks to this?
Would somebody else's 9 step program work better?
Did somebody distill it down to some other more elegant principles that you just happened to follow by doing the 8-step thing?
There's never anything rigorous in the realm of marketing & communication courses
The reaction you may get:
https://youtu.be/rnso4nfdM9w?si=YixDlKDmBXB7xrXc
(From "Something about Mary" film.)
After all, if only number of words written mattered, the best thing to do would be to just have an empty slide.
Being concise is better than verbosity all things being equal, but not at the expense of failing to clearly get your point across.
I actually thought they were quite good.
Original: "Survey results"
Suggested: "Survey output indicates main root cause of churn is awareness of better value for money offering."
My suggestion depending on the context would be: "Survey: we're too expensive" or "Survey: churn due to cheaper alternatives" which will be read by 5x more people.
I, for one, think the specificity is worth the extra couple of words.
Her video is pretty good, though.
All that matters is presentation and then you'll have "engagement".
No need to be talking about anything interesting.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
The way I see it, 'content creation' is all about quantity not quality or having any message/goal.
And 'engagement' is about getting people to react emotionally (doesn't matter if positively or negatively) to get them to spam your 'content' to others.
When Sting was being interviewed by Rick Beato, he said that when he listens to a new song, if he isn't surprised by something real quick, he loses interest.
"If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. Oh wait! Everyone IS doing it."