There is a growing appreciation of the importance of story in all forms of communication, but there is still a tendency to think of story as something distinct from fact, a kind of decoration on top of the basic communication of facts. This presentation argues that the distinction is false, that it is really stories all the way down, and that it is when we forget the every phrase and every sentence invokes a story, that we fail to communicate effectively.

1. IT’S STORIES ALL THE WAY DOWN
Mark Baker
2015

2. It’s Stories All the Way Down
Mark Baker
Author: Every Page is Page One: Topic-based Writing for
Technical Communication and the Web

3. Storytelling and Purpose
“The idea of “purpose” has swept the
corporate world. … But activating
purpose is impossible without
storytelling. … Individuals must learn to
connect their drives to the
organization’s purpose and to articulate
their story to others.”
John Coleman, Use Storytelling to Explain Your Company’s
Purpose, HBR

4. What we sell is the ability for a 43-
year-old accountant to dress in black
leather, ride through small towns
and have people be afraid of him. –
Harley Davidson Exec (apocryphal?)

5. Power of story in business
“Facts and figures and all the rational
things that we think are important in
the business world actually don’t stick in
our minds at all,” …. But stories create
“sticky” memories by attaching
emotions to things that happen.
How to Tell a Great Story, Carolyn O'Hara, HBR

6. Assumed Dichotomy
Stories Facts

7. “[C]haracter-driven stories with
emotional content result in a better
understanding of the key points a
speaker wishes to make and enable
better recall of these points weeks
later.”
Paul J. Zak, Why Your Brain Loves Good Storytelling

11. Swiss
Bankers
Botswana
Farmers
Shared language

12. IMF IT
Washington
IMF
Librarians
Washington
Shared language

13. Problem widely recognized
Every single person working on the web today has dealt with
a situation where the pain with no name has reared its ugly
head, leaving disinformation and misinformation in its wake.
Consider:
 “Our marketing team has a different language than the
technology team.”
 “Our users don’t understand the language of our
business.”
 “The way this is labeled or classified is keeping users
from finding or understanding it.”
 “We have several labels for the same thing and it gets in
the way when discussing things.”
Abby Covert, The Pain With No Name, A List Apart

14. And known
from of old

16. Taxonomy to the Rescue?
 Agreement on terms = clear
communication
 Or does it?

17. Not enough words to go round
 English: up to a million words(?)
 Average English speaker
 active vocabulary 20,000 words
 passive vocabulary 40,000 words
 Everyday writing
 first 25 words are used in 33%
 first 100 words appear in 50%
 first 1,000 words are used in 89%
See: http://everypageispageone.com/2015/08/04/the-economy-of-language-or-why-we-argue-about-words/

18. Words are like phyllo pastry
CCBY-SA3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=174342

19. How do we talk about
so much stuff with so
few words?
We tell stories.

20. Stories made up of stories
Algorithms make mistakes all the time. Just think
about auto-correction on your iPhone, the
recommendations on Netflix, or the coupons
automatically printed at Kmart’s checkout. Just
this past week, a fraud detection algorithm
incorrectly blocked my ATM card while I was
traveling in Germany, despite having called in a
travel notification before the trip.
KAISER FUNG, ANDREW GELMAN,
Why Consumers Should Care About Apple’s War on Big Data

21. Stories
all the
way down

22. Words evoke stories
 What picture pops into your head
when you hear:
“See Spot Run”

23. A spot of paint running?

24. A dog running?

25. Fun with Dick and Jane?

27. Words evoke stories
“I met a man at the
poker game and he
gave me his card.”

28. This card?

29. Or this card?

30. Words evoke stories
 “See Spot run.”
 Does not mention “dog”
 Does not mention “Dick and Jane”
 “I met a man at the poker game
and he gave me his card.”
 Does not mention “business card”
 Does suggest playing card by association
with “Poker”
 Yet we know that is not what it means

31. Words evoke stories
“Click the OK button”

33. From telling to
assuming the story
 Move the mouse over the surface of the
desk until the screen cursor is over the
button labeled OK on your screen. Press
and release the left mouse button with
your finger. You will hear a click and the
dialog box will disappear.
 Click the OK button.
 Click OK.

34. But “Click” does not tell the
whole story anymore
Robert Siebens
Experienced Technical Writer at Thomson
Reuters
Alternative to "Click" in Documentation?
Now that our readers are looking at our Help in a
variety of screen types, what are you all doing with the
word "Click"? Are you still using it in single-sourced
Help that appears in both touch and non-touch
screens? Are some of you migrating to "Select" as a
word that captures both a "Click" and a "Tap"? Other
ideas?
Post on LinkedIn

35. Suggestions
 tap
 select, choose
 But “double select” does not work
 And select is for options, not buttons
 select with a long press
 Why not just “long press”
 press

36. A generic alternative
 Mark Baker: The interfaces in
question are all still point-and-press
interfaces. All that is changed is what
we point with and how we press.
"Press" would work as a device
independent way of giving point-and-
press instructions.

37. Why is it “Click”?

38. Learned stories
 Steve Arrants: I have to disagree
about click. It IS, to the end user, the
action. After reading it, learning it,
using it for so long as an action (Click
OK, Click Close, Click Options and
then double-click Set.) that's how
they understand it. As far as most
users are concerned, the sound of
click is feedback that they've done it.

39. Words invoked learned stories
 “Click” names the feedback, not the
action.
 But once learned, “click” now means
the action.
 And we internalize the story and
forget it is a story. Recognition
becomes instantaneous.
 Until we try to find an analog for
touch interfaces!

40. How to words attach to stories?
 Why is click the word that invokes
this story? Why pick the feedback
sound?
 Theory: We choose the most concrete
word that is unambiguous in context

41. Why not Press originally?
 Ian Saunders: To me, "press" is
what you do on physical keyboards,
"click" is for mice, and either "touch"
or "tap" for touchscreens. So, I don't
think that "Press" is device
independent - it always refers to a
physical key or button.

42. One word, one meaning
 Simplified Technical English says, use
oil as noun, a not verb
 Don’t use: “Oil the bearing”
 Use: “Put oil on the bearing”

43. Put oil on the bearing
ByBarbetorte-Ownwork,CCBY-SA3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15672341

44. Put oil on the table
ByNerijp-Ownwork,CCBY-SA3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5145735

45. Put oil on the shopping list

46. How do we know?
 Put oil on the bearing means the fluid
 Put oil on the table means the bottle
 Put oil on the shopping list means the
word
 Because each phrase invokes a
different story in which “oil” plays a
different role

47. By Neil T - originally posted to Flickr as Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, CC BY-SA
2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5816068

48. The efficiency of language
 We don’t need to unpack the stories
we refer to
 We recognize the references instantly
 Stories feel like facts
 Without this facility, language would
be very inefficient

49. But what happens
when our audience
does not share our
stories?

50. Stories shape thinking
Words are impactful. They may not
break your bones, as the saying goes,
but they do guide the way we all think,
debate, decide and act.
The On-Demand, Sharing And Gig Economies Never Existed,
So Stop Pretending They Did, Matt Bencke, TechCrunch

51. Sharing economy
 Suggests a story of altruistic
communal living
 ‘The “sharing economy” term was
naive at best, destructive at
worst. Very few people share stuff for
free.’ -- Matt Bencke

52. Gig Economy
 Suggest the story of a struggling
band
 ‘The bias promoted by the term “gig”
is particularly destructive because it
confuses politicians’ -- Matt Bencke

53. Taxonomy can’t fix this
 Taxonomy tries to fix meanings to
words
 But words work together to evoke
stories
 Same words in different combinations
evoke different stories
 Same words evoke different stories in
different people

54. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=372117
Medical
taxonomy allows
doctors to
communicate
clearly
But they have to
go to medical
school to learn
the stories

55. Losing business
When an American manager in Japan cannot
understand why his Japanese staff will not give
him the “ballpark figure” he has demanded, this
breakdown in communication can lead to a real
disintegration in workplace relations. And the
underlying feelings of mistrust are mutual. The
inability of the travelling native English speaker to
refrain from homeland idiosyncrasies, subtextual
dexterity and cultural in-jokes has been found to
result in resentment and suspicion.
Spencer Hazel, Why native English speakers fail to be
understood in English – and lose out in global business

56. English speakers abroad
 [A]broad they discover that their own
English renders them
incomprehensible to colleagues and
business partners.
Spencer Hazel, Why native English speakers fail to be
understood in English – and lose out in global business

57. No shared stories = no shared
language
 But it is not just “idiosyncrasies,
subtextual dexterity and cultural
in-jokes”
 It is stories
 Foreign customers and partners
may speak English, but they don’t
share all of our stories

58. Swiss
Bankers
Botswana
Farmers
Few shared stories

59. ‘Many sensible strategies fail to drive action
because executives formulate them in sweeping,
general language. “Achieving customer delight!”
“Becoming the most efficient manufacturer!”
“Unlocking shareholder value!” One explanation
for executives’ love affair with vague strategy
statements relates to a phenomenon called the
curse of knowledge. Top executives have had
years of immersion in the logic and conventions of
business, so when they speak abstractly, they are
simply summarizing the wealth of concrete data in
their heads. But frontline employees, who aren’t
privy to the underlying meaning, hear only
opaque phrases. As a result, the strategies being
touted don’t stick.’
Chip and Dan Heath, The Curse of Knowledge, HBR

60. Curse of Knowledge
 The curse of knowledge is a
cognitive bias that leads better-
informed parties to find it extremely
difficult to think about problems from
the perspective of lesser-informed
parties. -- Wikipedia

61. Reader
Within a domain
You

62. You Reader
Between domains

63. You Reader
Stories

64. Words
ReaderYou

65. Two types of confusion
 Your words evoke no stories for the
reader
 The reader knows they are confused
 Your words evoke different stories for
the reader
 The reader does not know they are
confused
 Or they know of discover it through a
wider incongruity

66. By Robert Möst - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1754262
The curse of
knowledge
strikes fast!

67. ByUser:LiveForever-EnglishWikipedia,CCBY-SA3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2324027
Bridge the gap with stories

68. Stories build a picture
 Dave went to the store.

69. By Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2666267

70. Adding detail refines the picture
 Dave went to the store to buy milk.

71. By User:Joerite, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19566325

72. More detail refines further
 Dave went to the store to buy milk
because the baby was crying.

73. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=808069

74. Refine to remove ambiguity
 Everyone’s picture is different. We
keep refining our story until the
differences are incidental to the story
we are trying to tell.
 As far as we can tell…
 Because we can’t know for sure what
associations others might have to
lead them astray

75. Writer ReaderStory

76. Writer Reader
Story
Story Story
StoryStory
Story

77. By Binette228 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31888310
Stories are fractal

78. Fractal expansion of stories
does not stop when we hit
facts, but when we hit
common stories based on
common experience

79. Facts are just
stories we agree on.

80. Stories Defeat the Curse
“Concrete language and stories defeat
the curse of knowledge and make
executives’ strategy statements stickier.
As a result, all the members of an
organization can share an
understanding of the strategies and a
language for discussing them.”
Chip and Dan Heath, The Curse of Knowledge, HBR,

81. Hypertext connects stories

82. Keys
 All facts are stories
 All communication is an exchange of
stories
 Stories are made up of stories
 Be conscious of the curse of knowledge
 Figure out what stories the reader
knows, and how the express them
 Use hypertext to connect stories

83. Stories
all the
way down

84. Questions?
 Contact information
 Mark Baker
 Analecta Communications Inc.
 +1 226 808 1098
 mbaker@analecta.com
 Twitter: @mbakeranalecta
 http://analecta.com
 http://everypageispageone.com