Three Post-its to Transform Your Storytelling
When we put together technical stories, there are thousands of big and small decisions that we have to make along the way.
For example: what content should you keep in and what should you leave out? When should the story start? How much detail do you need to go into?
Making such decisions can be agonising, and can seriously slow us down.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Allow me to introduce you to: the Three Post-it Exercise.
In this exercise, you take three Post-it notes. On them, you should write the answers to the following three questions. When you’re done, stick the Post-its around the side of your laptop screen or the wall behind your desk.
Every time you reach a decision point and take a pause, I want you to refer back to the answers you wrote on your Post-it notes. These answers are your guiding principles, and should help you to make those decisions and get unstuck.
Post-it 1: What are your aims?
What are you aiming to achieve with your writing or presentation? Perhaps most obviously, you’ll be aiming to communicate; to put the ideas that are in your head into the heads of your audience.
But you might have other aims as well, for example to persuade your audience to take an action, to inspire them down a certain path, or to dispel a myth that you believe they hold. Perhaps you want to engage them in a two-way dialogue or have influence over the public discourse. Maybe you want to sell a product, an idea, or yourself for a promotion.
Alternatively, you might have more personal aims, such as to increase your own personal network, for CV points or simply to improve your own communication skills.
Then, of course, there’s one aim that so many of us forget when we’re deep in the detail - the aim to entertain.
In most cases, you’ll probably have several aims for a piece of communication, some personal, some professional. But I encourage you to write down no more than five on your Post-it and stick it above your writing space.
Post-it 2: Who’s your audience?
We need to get specific with this, if we can. It might take some research or a few educated guesses, but it’s well-worth taking the time to get to know your audience. Because only then can you begin to write them a story that resonates.
You might think of general audience demographics first, such as age, gender, number, cultural background and location. Those aspects can inform your approach, language and references. But we can go deeper, too.
In technical communication, it’s usually important to know what the audience’s level of expertise is. What do they already know and what can you add? Are they specialists in a particular subject, or are they more likely to be generalists?
How much time do they have available for you? Are they going to dedicate ten hours of their lives reading your book from cover to cover? Or do they just need a really brief summary of the information?
Do they have some sort of professional stake in what you’re saying? For example, if you’re communicating at a job interview, those people are looking for certain criteria, so can you give them those criteria in your story to make their job easier? If you’re writing a paper, are your audience just looking for easily citeable sentences?
Does your audience have a personal relationship to the subject matter? For some topics and audiences, this might not be so relevant, but if you’re communicating on a sensitive topic such as a disease, for example, your audience will likely have a personal stake in the subject. So, the way that you talk about patients, or trials or survival rates has huge emotive weight for the audience. If this is the case for you, take care with the language you use and the promises you make.
And finally, perhaps most important of all, does your audience have any accessibility requirements that you need to adjust for? What are the best formats for them? How can you make it as easy as possible for them to digest the information?
Post-it 3: What do they want and need?
Once you know who your audience are, what are they wanting to get from your piece of communication? And, unknown to them, what do you think they need?
Are they simply interested in information? In which case you need to put that front and centre. Are they interested in specific details, do you think, about the methods or the results of your study?
Are they listening to you because they want to be informed by an expert, in which case, you need to tell them your credentials before you dive in.
Are they incredibly busy and all they need from you is brevity, not a great big long story about the background?
Are they needing convincing, do you think? Are they needing inspiring or wanting new ideas from you?
And finally, are they looking to be entertained? I would go so far as to say that the vast majority of audiences, even in a professional setting, need entertaining on some level.
Stick the answers to these questions on your physical or imagined wall of Post-its:
What are my aims?
Who’s my audience?
What do they want and need from me?
These become our North Star as we begin to plan, write and edit a technical story.
