Show, don’t tell

One of the universal principles of storytelling is to show, rather than tell, your listeners what it is you have to say. It seems counter-intuitive that in storytelling you’re not supposed to “tell”, but rather “show” your listeners. However, one of the main strengths of a good story is its ability to transport your listeners to a new setting, mood, or mindset: to show them what it is really like.

I came across the ad below on Adfreak.com last week, and, as they note, it’s a good example of this principle applied in marketing. The ad takes us through a regular day of a regular person: Jeff. Jeff is, however, also a blind person. Rather than telling us that “it is more difficult for a blind person to navigate traffic than it is for person with perfect vision,” this ad shows us what it is like for Jeff to commute to work. The story — because it’s told from Jeff’s perspective – puts us into his shoes and allows us to experience his reality for ourselves.

The key of showing, rather than telling, also lies with the details: the “sound shadows”, the explanations of how to know when to cross the street, how it gets so much harder to hear traffic in rain are the details that make Jeff’s reality real – to us.

This is also why it resonates when Jeff says “I think television is part of society, right? It’s where we get our information from. It’s where we get our entertainment from. And being able to access that medium on par with everybody else in society is fantastic.” We fully sympathize with his endorsement of the products that the ad is promoting: full-text spoken-word versions of articles and voiced descriptions of action happening on TV.

This aspect of storytelling — to allow your listeners to experience for themselves, rather than just to tell them what it’s like – is naturally one of the reasons why storytelling is such a persuasive tool. What you are able to experience for yourself, even when it’s just through a story, is more real and believable than anything you’re told.