Don’t tell, show!

As a hobby, I write short stories for children. My kids love them, and so do my friends and relatives kids. I’m not suggesting that makes me the next JKRowling but it’s a nice thing to be thought of as a “Story Teller” :) You’d not believe the adventures of Sophie’s Dragon… or the sound effects of dragon wings!

A while ago I put one of my favourite stories onto a site for critique and got the standard response of “Don’t tell; show!“. I soon learned that this was pretty much the only advice given on the site and my suspicion is that it was once given to someone by a ‘real’ or professional writer/critic and has become part of the mythos of the site, if you see what I mean….

It struck me, however, that for presentations as well as stories, this is a fine bit of advice!

Don’t tell me what you think… or what will happen if… or what you found when you… or what it’s like in the country of…. show me. Forget the words, forget the bullet-points; abandon the lists; throw out the dry stuff.

If you want to connect with me, to change me, to have an effect, to make me remember, show me something.

Don’t tell me the Namib desert is dry – show me a picture of the sands.
Don’t tell me the cash-flow forcast is bad – show me a graph
Don’t tell me various ways you got funding – show me a pie chart
Don’t tell me how fast the new computer is – show me a comparison (live if you can!)

By all means have the necessary data available to back up your claims (in a written document to leave behind, perhaps) but please, please please, don’t force me to listen to it verbatim (or worse yet, read it from slides as you read it to me!).

May I give you a personal example?

My younger daughter is off to Namibia for three weeks in the summer and one of the ways she’s raising funding is by giving talks to groups like Round Table and Rotary Clubs. One of the things she wanted to explain was where Namibia is. It’s on the south-west coast of Africa, adjacent to South African. Big deal. However, a satallite image of the continent, slowly re-orientating and zooming in to show the location of the country is more exciting, more interesting and provides not only a strong feel for the location but also it’s world-wide context.

Another example… she wants to talk about the roles in the team while they’re there

In most circles, that would be a bullet-point list. For my daughter it’s a series of carefully edited images, building into a clever montage showing a fork, sergeant stripes, a compass, a pile of coins and a walking boot. (I’m not showing the result here because it won’t work without the subtle build animation for the slide, sorry!)

Imagine the difference!

Perhaps these aren’t the bet example in the world to use (but they’re important in our household right now, so tough! :) ) but remember the advice of authors: don’t tell, show!