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Comment by joelg | Hacker News Reader

That's really unfortunate and naive. Not everything, particularly the subtle dynamics of human interaction, can be succinctly distilled into an abstract-style paragraph. Oftentimes it takes great writing skill to set right perspective, context, and background for the information to make sense or "click" - perspective which I find to be more valuable than the raw "information" or study results.

Storytelling is sometimes the only way to properly convey information.

- slightly edited for clarity -

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No, I'm with Touche here. Too many articles hide the actual story under a "human angle" aspect where we have to learn about someone's early childhood growing up in Soviet Russia, or their first failed business, or that time their father said Something Memorable to them. I've read so many of those now that I start to fall asleep before the article begins talking about whatever it is talking about. The naivety on display here is the journalists sticking hard-and-fast to the rules we're taught in middle school English class: you have to have a "hook" so that the audience get's caught! But those hooks are artificial and repetitive - let the content speak for itself. If it can't, then the article isn't worth my reading.

Anecdotes are still relevant. But using them religiously as the opening turns me away.

That's especially annoying since journalists should know better! It's them who have "golden standard" of the "inverted pyramid". I.e. a headline should be the "tl;dr" of the article. Then the first paragraph should be a little longer "tl;dr" of the article. The reader should be able to recursively learn more details, but also should be able to walk away with all the core facts after the very first paragraph.

I enjoyed listening to the book "Smarter Faster Better" in which this article is one of the chapters.

http://www.audible.com/pd/Business/Smarter-Faster-Better-Aud...

It also deals with how the script of movie "Frozen" evolved and I found that very interesting as well. It showcases how your idea gets better & better for execution because of the team.

You remember the concept of a thesis statement? This author didn't.

Storytelling is NEVER the ONLY way to convey information, though it can be the MOST EFFICIENT. Specifically, the narrative form tends to be more memorable/impactful than disconnected propositions, so if the majority of the context in the story is necessary to understand the information, it ends up being a net win.

Read my other comment; the title didn't convey this subtlety so I didn't expect the article to.

I think this is like learning styles, different people need different communication methods.

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