Rather than saying that the approach you have described to your audience is simply good<\/em> or bad<\/em> in and of itself, you are now inferring that of all the approaches that might have been taken, yours is the best<\/em> (or worst<\/em>) way to go.<\/p>\n Clearly that has a lot more power to it because you are telling everyone, \u201cIf you find yourself in this<\/em> situation, exclude any other paths; take only this<\/em> one,\u201d or, \u201cIf you find yourself in this<\/em> situation, no matter what you do, don\u2019t do this<\/em>!\u201d<\/p>\n Still, because you\u2019ve only shown the one path, even though you are saying it is better than any others, you have not illustrated the others.\u00a0 Therefore, you are making a blanket<\/em> statement.<\/p>\n Now, an audience simply won\u2019t sit still for a blanket statement. They\u2019ll cry, \u201cFoul!\u201d They will be thinking of the other paths they might personally have taken and will at least question you.<\/p>\n So, if our early author sitting around a fire says, \u201cHey, this is the best of all possible paths,\u201d his audience is going to say , \u201cWhat about this other<\/em> case? What if we tried this, this or this?\u201d<\/p>\n If the author had a sound case he would respond to all the solutions the audience might suggest, compare them to the one he was touting and conclusively show that the promoted path was, indeed, the best (or worst). But if a solution suggested by the audience proves better than the author\u2019s, his blanket statement loses all credibility.<\/p>\n In a nutshell, for every rebuttal the audience voices, the author can attempt to counter the rebuttal until he has proven his case or at least exhausted their interest in arguing with him.\u00a0 Since he is there in person, he won\u2019t necessarily have to argue every conceivable alternative solution \u2013 just the ones the audience brings up. And if he is successful, he\u2019ll eventually satisfy everyone\u2019s concerns or simply tire them out to the point they are willing to accept his conclusions.<\/p>\n But what happens if the author isn\u2019t there when the story is related?\u00a0 The moment a story is recorded and replayed as a poem, a song ballad, a stage play, or a motion picture (for example), then the original author is no longer present to counter any rebuttals the audience might have to his blanket statement.<\/p>\n So if someone in the audience thinks of a method of resolving the problem and it hasn\u2019t been addressed it in the blanket statement, they will feel there is a hole in the argument and that the author hasn\u2019t made his case.<\/p>\n Therefore, in a recorded art form, a successful communicator needs to include all the other reasonable approaches that might be suggested in order to \u201csell\u201d his approach as the best or the worst.<\/p>\n He needs to show how each alternative is not as good (or as bad) as the one he is promoting thereby proving that his blanket statement is correct.<\/p>\n A narrative, then, becomes a far more complex proposition than a simple tale.\u00a0 Now the author must anticipate all the other ways the audience might consider solving the problem in question. In effect, he has to include all the ways anyone<\/em> might reasonably think of solving that problem.<\/p>\n Essentially, he has to include all the ways any human mind<\/em> might go about solving that problem. In so doing, as an accidental by-product, generations of communicators have arrived at our modern conventions of narrative structure: a model of the mind\u2019s problem-solving process encoded in the framework itself.<\/p>\n Excerpted from the book, A Few Words About Communication<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n
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