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I recently picked up the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People". It's full of story telling, with very little fact, and the main thrusts of each chapter
by r_smart 10y ago
I recently picked up the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People". It's full of story telling, with very little fact, and the main thrusts of each chapter are summarized in a sentence. The bulk of the chapters is mostly just stories.
Overall this seems like a really effective strategy for the subject matter. It's easy to intellectually understand the summary sentences, but all the stories in the chapters are illustrative, and the idea is that spending time with the book helps reinforce the mindset that leads to the attitudes it espouses.
So that was a long winded way of saying: Good point.
I will say that a lot of long form journalism pieces these days seem overly focused on their narratives, and often, feel like time wasting to me. But I'm usually in information gathering mode when I read them. I don't want personal stories, I want facts, and links to research when I'm in that mindset. Maybe it just feels to me like they are too often considering the story they're telling as proof enough of their point without doing enough to support it otherwise.