Storytelling With Data

The idea is that you should first tell your audience what you’re going to tell them (“Bing,” the introduction paragraph in your essay). Then you tell it to them (“Bang,” the actual essay content). Then you summarize what you just told them (“Bongo,” the conclusion).

McKee says there are two ways to persuade people: The first is conventional rhetoric. In the business world, this typically takes the form of PowerPoint slides filled with bulleted facts and statistics. It’s an intellectual process. But it is problematic, because while you’re trying to persuade your audience, they are arguing with you in their head

bar charts should be leveraged because they are common, as this means less of a learning curve for your audience. Instead of using their brain power to try to understand how to read the graph, your audience spends it figuring out what information to take away from the visual.

Visual clutter creates excessive cognitive load that can hinder the transmission of our message. The Gestalt Principles of Visual Perception can help you understand how your audience sees and allow you to identify and remove unnecessary visual elements. Leverage alignment of elements and maintain white space to help make the interpretation of your

The middle Once you’ve set the stage, so to speak, the bulk of your communication further develops “what could be,” with the goal of convincing your audience of the need for action. You retain your audience’s attention through this part of the story by addressing how they can solve the problem you introduced. You’ll work to convince them why they s

One strategy is to have an executive summary slide up front, with each bullet corresponding to a subsequent slide title in the same order (Figure 7.2). This is a nice way of setting it up so your audience knows what to expect and then is taken through the detail

Lesson 1: understand the context

There needs to be sufficient contrast to make something draw your audience’s attention.

Another way to think about the imbalance-balance-solution in your communication is to frame it in terms of the problem and your recommended solution. If you find yourself thinking, But I don’t have a problem!—you may want to reconsider. As we’ve discussed, conflict and dramatic tension are critical components of a story. A story where everything is

Graph axis vs. data labels When graphing data, a common decision to make is whether to preserve the axis labels or eliminate the axis and instead label the data points directly. In making this