Comments on: How Long and How Truthful Should an Anecdote Be? http://www.hardingco.com/blog/2007/11/12/how-long-and-how-truthful-should-an-anecdote-be/ Ford Harding's Blog on Rainmaking and Business Development Fri, 4 Jul 2008 01:15:49 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.6 by: Steve S http://www.hardingco.com/blog/2007/11/12/how-long-and-how-truthful-should-an-anecdote-be/#comment-867 Sun, 25 Nov 2007 12:49:15 +0000 http://www.hardingco.com/blog/2007/11/12/how-long-and-how-truthful-should-an-anecdote-be/#comment-867 Good storytelling is perhaps the most memorable and effective ways of communicating. An anecdote is a very short story - even shorter than a parable - and should therefore limit itself to illustrating a single concise point. I don't think you need to "distill a problem that took a client five years of mismanagement to get into and eighteen months of our work to extricate them from down to a mere seven sentences". All you have to do is to find one searing aspect of their mismanagement that you are choosing to illuminate to the listener. Good storytelling is perhaps the most memorable and effective ways of communicating. An anecdote is a very short story - even shorter than a parable - and should therefore limit itself to illustrating a single concise point.

I don’t think you need to “distill a problem that took a client five years of mismanagement to get into and eighteen months of our work to extricate them from down to a mere seven sentences”. All you have to do is to find one searing aspect of their mismanagement that you are choosing to illuminate to the listener.

]]>