Stories that Move Mountains: Storytelling and Visual Design for Persuasive Presentations

Retention

Do you have a lot of material in your story? How will your audience remember it? There are limits on the number of things we can hold in our very short-term memory. This limit depends on the person, but it's usually between five and ten different things. When people are taught the techniques for improving recall and the ability to remember long lists, part of the training is learning to create visual sequences, build stories from the content, and cluster content into groups they can then name.

The same techniques apply for your visual story. Whether in a presentation that's delivered totally orally or on a poster, you will create structures that group information to make it easier to remember.

TIP: While drafting your story, it may even be useful at some point to enumerate your top five messages to help you stay focused, keep them numbered in your presentation until the last minute, but drop the numbers from the final versions, unless you want the audience to treat the items sequentially.

In Chapter 11 we explained that a character in your story acts as a container for motivations, actions, and characteristics. So be sure that all your characters have names to provide the consistent link to the information about them. As you test your story, check to be sure you have associated your content to the characters to help your audience remember. It's no accident that the CAST process is split into four main sections, each with two or four activities, and each activity with ...