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Justin Soles <<...realised that a lot of what we do in technical
writing is just that: storytelling. We may frame and present it
in different terms,... but the focus is in engaging our reader /
viewer / audience, having them resolve a particular conflict
and move forward towards a conclusion. George Lucas
may have a wider scope, better special effects and a bigger
budget, but the idea of telling a story to educate, illustrate and
demonstrate is the same.>>
It's an interesting notion, particularly the idea of engaging our
readers, but the vast majority of what we do is completely
alien to storytelling techniques because our work emphasizes
interaction with something or someone else; by contrast,
whereas storytelling is (to be simplistic*) an entirely passive
activity for the audience, and the audience rarely goes out
and accomplishes some task based on the story they've heard.
I think that it would be more accurate to say that technical
communication borrows some tools (parable, metaphor,
suspense and resolution) from storytelling, and adapts them to
an entirely different context.
There _are_ contexts in which the storytelling comparison
becomes particularly appropriate; user manuals for plot-based
computer games, for example, rely to a greate or lesser extent
on a narrative to set the scene and draw you in, and children's
software uses similar techniques sometimes. But it's hard to
see how you'd do that with (say) a spreadsheet: "And then it
was that Prince Corum Jhaelen Irsi did battle with Excel,
cleaving with Stormbringer until binary blood ran down his
mighty thews and not a cell remained intact. But when he was
done, a single VBA macro remained, and it was to cause him
much grief later." <g>
* Let me qualify that: I've certainly seen people like Jane
Yolen tell a story that sucks you right in and leaves you dry-
mouthed at the end because your mouth has fallen open
during the telling of the tale. In some cases, this is because
the storyteller actively invites audience response (and thus
makes the story far more interactive) and does things like
making eye contact in a way that let you interact with her.
I've even seen her write stories (e.g., the movie version of
_The Devil's Arithmetic_) that leave you so moved that you
can't help but take action afterwards. But on the whole,
storytelling goes one way (from the teller to the audience) and
invites a passive response.
