simpy
simpy
Try a Story Idea Prompt
So if you are stuck for ideas, here are some prompts:
* What was your favorite childhood pet?
* Where was your most memorable vacation?
* What topic most inspired you in grade school?
* Where is a place in the world you'd like to visit?
* What is the most adventurous thing you have done?
* Who was an influential authority in your subject discipline?
* Or just describe a collection of things such as
o Five attributes of a great writer
o The top technology gadgets of the future
o Most important discoveries in your field
o Favorite cars, vegetables, flowers, tools
o Collection of things that don't belong
Why is it I have such a hard time writing down stories?
After being on both the giving and receiving end of plenty of presentations, I now realize there's one golden rule which applies to all of them:
Entertain your audience.
Every slide of your presentation should serve this fundamental vision statement. Is it entertaining? I don't mean each slide has to contain a wacky joke of some kind. Every slide should provoke a reaction from the audience -- be it controversial, unexpected, amusing, or a meditative Zen koan. Prod your audience. Do this not only to keep them awake, but to engage their brains. Deliver a series of short, sharp shocks that jolt your audience into a heightened state of engagement.
Once your audience has engaged with your presentation, that's when you trick them into learning. The very best presentations entertain and educate-- the common portmanteau is edutainment. The archetypal example of edutainment is Sesame Street.
As newsgathering continues to evolve, new ways of keeping track of current events are developing. Dave Winer joins Phil and Scott to discuss how Twitter and other social networking tools are changing the way that people read and react to the news. He talks about how he followed prior major news stories and why he now has started using social networking tools as a better way.
He then discusses his work with Twitter stats and reviews what can be learned from how Twitter works. He also reviews the possible future of these tools and assesses some of the ways that information is compiled and distributed and what might be different as time goes on.
The argument continues to this day. People who say Twitter is a conversational medium would agree with those who say Barger was the founder. I see Twitter as a publishing environment, a place to push links, a notification system. Oddly, I think Barger with his linkblog approach (which was the same as the early Scripting News or the News Page of the 24 Hours project) would agree.
Brook Wilensky-Lanford grew up on beautiful Mount Desert Island, Maine, and studied religion at Wesleyan University, the marvelous faculty of which bear no responsibility for any of the Mythographer’s errors. She has just completed Columbia’s Nonfiction Writing MFA program. In between, she has written church newsletters, answered fan mail for a perfume company, and edited photography books. She’s a contributor to Storyville radio. Her personal and historical essays have appeared in Salon and Triple Canopy and Books That Saved My Life, and she’s working on a book about people who are looking for the Garden of Eden, literally. (There are more of them than you might think, and they’re still looking.)
- short (because people don't read much online);
- rich in information scent, clearly summarizing the target article;
- front-loaded with the most important keywords (because users often scan only the beginning of list items);
- understandable out of context (because headlines often appear without articles, as in search engine results); and
- predictable, so users know whether they'll like the full article before they click (because people don't return to sites that promise more than they deliver).
