Paint a picture with your words

Avoid lazy and ambiguous adjectives to engage your audience

Writing has a dirty little secret. Want to know what the secret is? Pictures.

So says Dan Roam in his foreword to The Power of Visual Storytelling by Ekaterina Walter and Jessica Gioglio. Dan says people have drawn for 32,000 years but we’ve only written for the last 5,000.

And we’ve been talking for even longer. So why is it that when we combine all three into a presentation on a video screen or projector it is so boring? Seeking an answer to this question led me to Sage Tyrtle’s excellent Storytelling class. My answer to the question is that we rely on these newer forms of communication and our verbal storytelling is falling into a state of atrophy.

We must flex our storytelling muscles and paint pictures for our audiences. We can let them come to their own conclusions without smacking them over the head and dragging them by their hair.

Painting a picture with words is easy. Want to know the secret? Avoid lazy and ambiguous adjectives. Here’s an example:

My grandmother had a big, beautiful house in a small town.

Nothing too exciting there. If we’re having a polite conversation, you might ask me where the town is or what the house looks…