4 ms·

> What's more important: knowing how the story ends, or the subtle inflections and dramatic pauses? The inflections and pauses are the story. People are often

> What's more important: knowing how the story ends, or the subtle inflections and dramatic pauses? The inflections and pauses are the story. People are often disappointed when a good story ends. If the goal of your story is just to densely transmit information then maybe you should just print bullet points on cards and mail them instead? It would save you the time wasted traveling to events.

sangnoir 4y ago
> If the goal of your story is just to densely transmit information then maybe you should just print bullet points on cards and mail them instead? This is exactly the reason why I prefer emails to meetings! Half[1] the meetings I attend can be replaced by emails, preferably with bullet points as you said. Edit: as child comment has pointed out, we may be talking across each other: for stories those are important but not crucial. For professional communication, I want as little subtlety as possible 1. Perhaps more. Meetings are a huge time sinks. Few people are effective at presiding over them: unactionable ramblings, repetition, demanding that people who don't need to be there to attend. Interestingly, the higher ups who invariably demand this "face-time" use similar arguments to yours
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  Not to interrupt a good argument too much, but you and the other poster may be equivocating between two types of communication: functional communication ("Mary, I need you to write a program...") and pleasure communication.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    I was about to edit the same observation after some thought. Not every piece of communication hasti be a story - even on YouTube.
    - cptskippy 4y ago
      I agree with you that meetings are mostly a waste of time, and at the same time most people do not invest much time in communicating effectively. Because of the later, meetings become necessary to extract information or get questions answered timely because back-and-forth exchanges occur painfully slow over email. Email could eliminate most meetings if people bothered to invest time in anticipating questions and preempting them. Providing clarity and insight rather than vagary. But they don't, thus we have meetings. 99% of the time the person asking for the meeting can even be bothered to write an agenda or give you any opportunity to prepare. At best you get vague subjects like "discuss stuff". I'm even starting to see this laziness appear in search results for answers to obscure questions being buried in 15 min long YouTube videos which end up being screen captures with some middle school AV club quality title sequences because that's easier than writing. But my original remarks were in regards to story telling.

sangnoir 4y ago

> If the goal of your story is just to densely transmit information then maybe you should just print bullet points on cards and mail them instead? This is exactly the reason why I prefer emails to meetings! Half[1] the meetings I attend can be replaced by emails, preferably with bullet points as you said. Edit: as child comment has pointed out, we may be talking across each other: for stories those are important but not crucial. For professional communication, I want as little subtlety as possible 1. Perhaps more. Meetings are a huge time sinks. Few people are effective at presiding over them: unactionable ramblings, repetition, demanding that people who don't need to be there to attend. Interestingly, the higher ups who invariably demand this "face-time" use similar arguments to yours

vorpalhex 4y ago
Not to interrupt a good argument too much, but you and the other poster may be equivocating between two types of communication: functional communication ("Mary, I need you to write a program...") and pleasure communication.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  I was about to edit the same observation after some thought. Not every piece of communication hasti be a story - even on YouTube.
  - cptskippy 4y ago
    I agree with you that meetings are mostly a waste of time, and at the same time most people do not invest much time in communicating effectively. Because of the later, meetings become necessary to extract information or get questions answered timely because back-and-forth exchanges occur painfully slow over email. Email could eliminate most meetings if people bothered to invest time in anticipating questions and preempting them. Providing clarity and insight rather than vagary. But they don't, thus we have meetings. 99% of the time the person asking for the meeting can even be bothered to write an agenda or give you any opportunity to prepare. At best you get vague subjects like "discuss stuff". I'm even starting to see this laziness appear in search results for answers to obscure questions being buried in 15 min long YouTube videos which end up being screen captures with some middle school AV club quality title sequences because that's easier than writing. But my original remarks were in regards to story telling.