People remember information better when stories are organized according to well-known structures. (Mandler and Johnson 1977; Kintsch, Mandel and Kozminsky in 1977; Mandler 1978; Stein 1976; and Thorndyke 1977)

The reason: People have mental frameworks — aka schemata — that they’ve built through experience and instruction. These mental frameworks provide a skeletal structure for organizing information as they read. (Anderson, 1977; Rumelhart, 1975)

“Comprehension and composition bear a reciprocal relation to each other.”

— Robert C. Calfee, Ph.D, professor of Education and Psychology at Stanford University

The more familiar the writer’s framework, the easier it is for readers to place new information into their own schematas. Otherwise, information just comes across as a list of facts, which people can only recall through rote memorization.

That’s why researchers Robert C. Calfee and R. Curley set out to create a taxonomy, or classification, of the most well-known story structures. Here’s what they learned along the way.

Common story structures

Bonnie J.F. Meyer suggests using one of these five structures for the major points in your piece:

Bonnie Armbruster, Ph.D., professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, lists these common structures:

• Simple list: List items or ideas where the order of presentation is not significant.
• Compare/contrast: Describe similarities or differences between two or more things.
• Temporal sequence: Show the passage of time.
• Cause and effect: Organize by reason and result.
• Problem/solution: Cite the problem and the solution.

Draw a narrative line

Armbruster also offers these elements for a narrative story:

• Goals
• Actions
• Outcomes

In 1975, cognitive psychologist David Rumelhart developed this formula for a simple narrative:

• A story = a setting (It was a dark and stormy night) + 1 or more episodes
• An episode = an event (Boy meets girl) + 1 or more responses
  • A response includes:
    • A plan (He decided to call her).
    • An action (He picked up the phone.)
    • A consequence (And she came running.)

All the story structures that are fit to print?

Based on their survey of story structures, Calfee and Curley developed this taxonomy.

Which of these story structures can you use to make your next piece easier to read, understand and remember?

___

Sources: Robert C. Calfee, and R. Curley “Structures of prose in content areas,” In Understanding reading comprehension, ed. J. Flood. Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 1984, pp. 161-180

Bonnie J. F. Meyer, “Reading Research and the Composition Teacher: The Importance of Plans, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 33, No. 1 (February 1982), pp. 37-49

Bonnie B. Armbruster, “The problem of inconsiderate text,” in Comprehension instruction, ed. G. Duffey. New York: Longmann, 1984, pp. 202-217

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Thank you, David Letterman.

The Top 10 list rules the web — or at least, Buzzfeed. The number of Buzzfeed listicles with the numeral 10 in the headline outranked the next most popular numeral (15) by 142%, according to research by Noah Veltman and Brian Abelson, two Knight-Mozilla fellows. Fiddle around with their addictive “listogram” for details.

But just because Buzzfeed writers like the number 10 doesn’t make that the best number for your listicle. So how many items should you include? Here are eight thoughts about that:

1. Consider including more items.

Abelson found a slight correlation between Buzzfeed list length and the number of tweets the list gets: The longer the list, the more tweets.

But don’t forget: Tweeting doesn’t mean reading.

“We’ve found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading,” writes Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat, which measures traffic for sites like Upworthy.

2. But don’t include too many.

Hundreds of items might overwhelm potential readers. “6 steps to 6-pack abs”? Maybe. 66 steps? Forget it!

And no matter what the headline says, there really aren’t “99 Things You Need To Know About Franz Ferdinand Before The 100th Anniversary Of His Assassination.”

3. And don’t include too few.

When it comes to lists, remember what you learned at Three Dog Night camp:

One is the loneliest number. Two can be as bad as one. It’s the loneliest number since the number one

Why?

• One item is an item. So no “Top 1 Reason Why ‘The X-Factor’ Is Going To Be Better Than ‘The Voice’.”
• Two items are a couple. So no “2 Excellent Parodies Of Amanda Palmer’s ‘A Poem For Dzhokhar’.”
• It takes three items to make a list. “3 Classy Ways To Get Drunk On St. Patrick’s Day“? Sure!

Besides, posts with headlines promoting seven or more items outperformed those with six or fewer, according to an internal study of HubSpot’s blog. While HubSpot still posts pieces with six or fewer items, writes Pamela Vaughan, HubSpot’s lead blog strategist, the inbound marketing experts don’t promote that quantity in the headline.

4. Embrace your oddness.

Oddly, odd numbers on magazine coverlines sell better than even ones, according to Folio:. Bloggers have taken note.

“It’s long been a superstition in the business — for years — that an odd number will do better than an even number,” BuzzFeed’s Jack Shepherd told the folks at Neiman Lab.

So 7 Steps may be more effective than 10 Tips.

5. Or maybe 10 is the magic number?

Lists with 10 items received the most social shares, according to research by BuzzSumo. The provider of content marketing analytics itself analyzed the number of shares of more than 100 million articles.

Top 10 lists had four times the number of social shares — 10,621 on average — than the second most popular list number: 23.

Runners up: 16 and 24.

6. Steer clear of 20.

“Yeah, I think probably people shy away from 20,” Shepherd told Nieman Labs. “Twenty feels real weird.”

7. But do use a number.

Numbers sell, because they indicate quantity and value in the information.

“Honestly,” Shepherd said, “I’ve often made posts where the post didn’t need a number, and then I’ll throw a number into the headline — just because people like that more.”

We know, Mr. Shepherd. We know.

8. Or don’t.

The best length for your list: the number of items your research turns up.

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A colleague in health system marketing counsels his case study writers to “Get the patient to the hospital.” Wrong! When it comes to case studies, it’s about the client’s problem and results, silly, not your solutions.

“The best case studies focus on the client’s problems, not on your solution.”

Here’s how to use the feature-style story structure to organize a case study.

I. Introduce the problem and client in the intro.

A. Cover the desk-pounding moment in the lead. What caused your client to search for your solution? Here’s an example, from a case study my team wrote for Sprint TekNet:

B. Describe the client in the background section. Don’t weigh the lead down with the client’s details. Save this for the background section, aka the blah-blah-blah background. Include any details, such as economic issues, that make the problem you introduced in the lead more significant:

C. Summarize the need in the nut graph. You may be able to handle this with a client quote:

Note that you might flip the nut graph and background section, depending on whether you need the client description to set up the need in the nut graph.

II. Outline the problem, solution and results in the body.

A. Detail the problem in the first section. Be specific: Name names and number numbers. Use a calculator, if necessary, to quantify the business needs.

B. Outline the solution in the second section. Your clients care more about their problems and results than about your organization and its stuff. A few broad brushstrokes will get this job done

C. Describe the results in the third section. Be specific: Name names and number numbers. Bonus points for mirroring the problems you outlined in the first section of the body.

III. Wind up in the conclusion.

A. Transition to the future in the Wrapup. In this case, the conclusion is a before-and-after comparison:

B. Show how far we’ve come — or where we’re going — in the Kicker. Leave a lasting impression with a concrete, creative, provocative final paragraph.

Case in point

Case studies are a staple of marketing writing. Use this structure to make the most of your next case in point.

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When the folks at Topolobampo, Chicago’s cathedral to Mexican cuisine, wanted to sell more syrah, they didn’t put signs on the tables saying “Buy wine!” Instead, they provided nifty little tabletop tipsheets on how to pair wine with Mexican food.

Take a tip from Topolobampo: Instead of always pushing your products, offer your customers news they can use to live their lives better. Tip sheets position your organization as the expert in the field and may drive more sales than purely promotional pieces.

Here are seven ways to make the most of your next tip sheet:

1. Find a topic.

Explain how to:

• Cut costs during the recession
• Save on taxes
• File for Social Security
• Grow a great lawn
• Reduce gas consumption
• Or do whatever it is your organization helps people do

Stumped? Check out this list of benefits. How can you help readers save money, save time, avoid effort and otherwise live their lives better?

The key here is to provide real value. Tip sheets on “Five reasons to work with Ann Wylie” will never gain traction. “10 tips for choosing an XYZ vendor” won’t change anyone’s life either.

Instead of offering self-serving tips, remember this content marketing formula: “Give, give, give, give, give, give, give, give, ask.”

2. Organize tips logically.

Choose the right structure:

• Alphabetical structure is best for glossaries, for instance.
• Chronological structure is the right choice for a series of steps. (As everyone who’s ever put together an Ikea bedside table well knows.)
• Hierarchical structure works best for top 10 lists.

3. Use the language of service stories.

How-to language — like top, 10, you, most, best and, of course, how to — has been a mainstay of service journalism for years. These days, this language tops the list of most-shared words and phrases on Facebook and Twitter, according to Zarrella’s research.

4. Put a number in the headline.

Numerals sell stories. That’s why coverlines on best-selling magazines are packed with numbers, from “Six Steps to Six-Pack Abs” to “101 Best Cheap Eats.” Blog post headlines and subject lines with numerals are more likely to get shared and opened, too.

But be careful: It’s not enough just to slap a 10 onto the headline. Odd numbers tend to outperform even numbers; specific numbers (99) are better than round ones (100); and 101 of anything is too many, unless you’re offering chocolate chip cookies or cute kitten videos.

5. Write in the imperative voice.

Speak directly to “you” using the second person, and start each item with a verb, like find, organize, use, put or write. That will also help you make your list of tips parallel, which your third-grade English teacher and I will appreciate.

6. Format your tips.

Numbered lists, bullets and bold-faced lead-ins lift your tips off the page and screen and make it easier for people to read your tips.

7. Deliver “go and do” information.

Links, phone numbers, times, dates, addresses and maps not only boost value. Links increase your message’s chances of going viral. And maps and addresses improve the chances that readers will act on your information.

Deliver news you can use.

“News you can use to live your life better” is the currency of most successful content marketing and PR writers.

Investor’s Business Daily’s motto is, “Don’t read it. Use it.” Shouldn’t that be your motto too?

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When you organize your copy logically, readers can read it more easily and get more out of it.

Or so says Bonnie J. F. Meyer, Ph.D., professor of Educational Psychology at Penn State University. She completed a five-year research project for the National Institute on Aging to find out what helped adults understand and remember what they’d read.

One element that made a big difference: the structure of the piece.

Ya gotta schemata

The reason: People have mental frameworks — aka schemata — that they’ve built through experience and instruction. These mental frameworks provide a skeletal structure for organizing information as they read. (Anderson, 1977; Rumelhart, 1975)

The clearer the writer’s framework, the easier it is for readers to place new information into their own schematas. Otherwise, information just comes across as a list of facts, which people can only recall through rote memorization.

Here are three ways, according to Meyers, that you can use structure to help people read your piece faster and remember it longer:

1. Follow a “topical plan.”

People read faster and remember more information that’s logically organized than they do when the same information is disorganized. (Kintsch, Mandel and Kozminsky, 1977)

Help them read faster. In one study, for instance, researchers gave half of the participants 1,400-word narrative passages and asked them to write a summary. The other half read the same information but with the content scrambled.

The summaries were much the same, but the scrambled versions took much longer to read. Readers needed the extra time to unscramble the content.

Help them remember longer. In another study, junior college students read two texts. Then they wrote down whatever they remembered, first right after reading, then again one week later.

Those who recognized and used the author’s structure to organize their memories retained far more content. They remembered the main ideas especially well, even a week later, and recovered more specific details, as well.

Those who didn’t use the author’s structures made disorganized lists of seemingly random ideas and couldn’t recover either the main ideas or the details very well. (Meyer, Brandt and Bluth 1980)

Think like a tree and leaf. Meyer proposes a tree-like structure of “nested hierarchies.” Put your main topics at the top, then drill down to more details in the branches. Here’s her structure for a piece about problems with oil tankers and four solutions:

Five structures. For the upper levels of the tree, Meyers suggests, you’ll probably use one of five structures:

The descriptive plan, the one used by newspapers, is least effective at helping people remember, according to Meyer’s early research. In two studies, participants were more likely to remember information from comparative and antecedent/consequence pieces than from descriptive stories — both immediately after reading and again a week later.

Using a solid structure is always essential. But it’s particularly important if you’re writing to younger readers, adults with lower reading skills and people who are unfamiliar with the subject.

2. Show the parts.

Average students remember more from stories that include “signaling” devices — display copy and transitions — than from those that don’t. Better students don’t need the signals as much, Meyer says; worse students may be lost no matter what help the writer gives them. (Meyer 1979)

So once you’ve organized your copy, use formatting and display copy to clarify the structure and hierarchy of your piece. Try:

• Headlines
• Subheads
• Underlining
• Italics
• Bold face

3. Show the relationships among and between facts.

The other type of signaling is within the text. Signaling includes:

• Previews, introductions
• Summaries
• Topic sentences
• Transitions

These signals remind readers what kind of structure they’re reading.

“If we encounter thus, therefore, consequently and the like, we know that the next statement should follow logically from whatever has already been presented,” Meyer says.

“If we see nevertheless, still, all the same or the like, we must be prepared for a statement that reverses direction.”

Help readers remember. In one study, a group of junior college students read a problem-solution piece about supertankers that included transitions. Another group read the same piece with the signaling deleted.

The deletions had no effect on the ability of the best or worst students to remember what they’d read. But those signals did make a difference for average readers. With the signaling, the average folks remembered more and organized the information better. (Marshall 1976, Meyer 1975)

Let form follow function. The structure and signals you choose will affect your readers’ understanding of the piece.

• Big picture: In one study, half of the participants read a comparison piece that signaled the structure with transitions like in contrast. Half read the same copy but without the structural cues. Those who got the signaling devices remembered the causal and comparative relationships but few of the details.
• Little picture: In another study, half of the participants read a time-ordered piece with transitions like early last century and soon after that. The other half read the same piece without the transitional phrases. Those who saw the transitions remembered the details very well but not the comparative and causal logic.

What do you want your readers to learn and remember? Let that goal drive your structural choice.

___

Source: Bonnie J. F. Meyer, “Reading Research and the Composition Teacher: The Importance of Plans, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 33, No. 1 (February 1982), pp. 37-49

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The feature-style story structure attracts 300% more readers and increases reading by 520%, according to an A/B test by Groove HQ.

Simply adding an anecdotal lead — the team didn’t change any other content — caused nearly three times as many people to scroll to the bottom of the post. It also increased time on page by more than five times.

Alex Turnbull, founder and CEO of Groove, suggests, among other things:

• Starting with a scenario
• Adding dialog to an anecdote
• Focusing on emotions

____

Source: Alex Turnbull, “The Power of Storytelling: How We Got 300% More People To Read Our Content,” Buffer, March 22, 2016

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Here’s the good news: You already know a structure that works for virtually everything you write. I’ll give you a hint. It doesn’t look like this:

That’s the inverted pyramid — the hierarchical blurtation of facts that starts with the most important element and moves to the least.

Many of us learned early on that the inverted pyramid was the only way to organize information. Because of that, most communicators are so committed to the inverted pyramid that we married it in college, have sustained a monogamous relationship with it over the years and have made lots of babies with it.

Friends, it’s time to start flirting around with another structure.

Today, more than 25 years of research tells us that while the inverted pyramid worked beautifully for distributing information over a telegraph wire, it does not work so well with a little subset of your audience known as humans. For years, reporters and others have said:

“We write in the inverted pyramid,
because readers cut us off after the first paragraph.”

But in new research, readers say:

“We cut you off after the first paragraph,
because you write in the inverted pyramid.”

So if the pyramid doesn’t work, what does?

Try the feature-style story structure.

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“Prose is architecture. It’s not interior design.”

— Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize-winning novelist

Study after study shows that when you add interesting, concrete details to your message, people remember them — sometimes to the exclusion of less fascinating, more abstract ideas.

But the power to attract may also distract readers from your main idea. If your “seductive details” don’t illustrate your key points, they can:

• Draw attention away from more important ideas (Luftig & Greeson, 1983)
• Disrupt text processing (Garner, Gillingham & White, 1989)
• Cause readers to forget the important information while remembering the interesting stuff (Baird & Hidi, 1984)

“Interesting but unimportant information frequently disrupts the learning of more important ideas,” writes Suzanne Hidi, associate member, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Centre for Applied Cognitive Science.

‘The seditious dealings of seductive details’

Indeed, say two researchers at Texas A&M University.

Ernest T. Goetz and Mark Sadoski reviewed the literature on “the seductive detail” and found these problems with that assumption.

So are readers being “bewitched by distracting details, bothered by incoherent text or bewildered by incomprehensible abstractions?” the researchers ask.

Not on your watch. Instead of adding irrelevant but colorful details, illustrate your important points with relevant concrete details. Make the important interesting, and people will remember your message — main points as well as colorful details — for far longer than if you bored them to death with important abstraction.

Avoid ‘Visual Vampires.’

Call these interesting but unimportant elements “Visual Vampires.” That’s PreTesting’s term for images that attract audience members in television ads but that don’t draw them to the product.

PreTesting is a Tenafly, N.J., company that gauges consumers’ reactions to ads by measuring their “saccadic” eye movements, or how fast their eyes vibrate.

Ads featuring men with wacky, red, pigtail wigs (Wendy’s), dogs wearing dentures (Citi) and an exotic woman stretching (Hormel) all grabbed attention. But they failed to keep it long enough to for viewers to read the copy or hear about the products.

Build an argument.

So take a tip from Hemingway. Ask, are your creative elements architecture, helping you build your argument? Or are they interior design, just putting wallpaper over your message?

If they’re interior design, they could be distracting readers from your key ideas. Instead, support your abstract, important ideas with concrete, interesting material.

Remember: It’s not enough to make your copy interesting. Our job is to, in the words of James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, “make the important interesting.”

___

Sources: Suzanne Hidi, “Interest and Its Contribution as a Mental Resource for Learning,” Review of Educational Research, Winter 1990, Vol. 60, No. 4, pp. 549-571

Kenneth Hein, “Beware of Visual Vampires, Warns Measurement Firm,” Brandweek, Nov. 26, 2007

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Talk about a transition. Here’s how author Erik Larson ends one chapter of Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America:

Transitions like Larson’s thrust the reader forward — from the end of one section to the beginning of the next. And that’s the job of external transitions: keeping the reader’s attention beyond a natural stopping point.

That means external transitions need to work harder than internal transitions, which just move the reader from sentence to sentence or paragraph to paragraph.

To write great external transitions:

1. Create cliff-hangers.

The best external transitions hint at what is to come. They keep the reader moving along by promising that something fascinating is just around the corner.

Larson is a master of the external transition. Here are two more chapter enders from Devil in the White City:

Ira Glass uses the same approach for “This American Life” station breaks. Here’s how he propelled listeners forward in the radio program’s legendary piece about the housing crisis, “The Giant Pool of Money”:
Let’s pause and ponder that for a minute too.

Of course, you have to make good on the promise of these external transitions. Cliffhangers followed by nonevents lose reader interest — and respect — in a hurry.

2. Model the mystery writers.

One way to polish external transitions is to study the last sentences in chapters of mysteries. “The Writer’s Guide to Hardy Boys Rack Books,” for instance, includes this excellent advice:

I think of section enders like these as “But that was before we found the body in the bathtub” transitions.

The idea is to write something that’s so provocative that the reader can’t stop reading. You want readers to think, “I’ll just read until they find that body in the bathtub.”

A series of small promises from you (“A body in the bathtub is just around the corner”) and small commitments from your reader (“I’ll just read until they find it”) might just get your tired, busy, distracted reader to read to the end.

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“Signal words” — aka transitions — are the narrative glue that helps readers see what’s coming next, understand your whole message and see how the parts fit together (Herber, 1978).

“If we encounter thus, therefore, consequently and the like, we know that the next statement should follow logically from whatever has already been presented,” writes Bonnie J. F. Meyer, Ph.D., professor of Educational Psychology at Penn State. “If we see nevertheless, still, all the same or the like, we must be prepared for a statement that reverses direction.”

Easier to remember.

In one study, for instance, a group of junior college students read a piece about supertankers that included transitions. Another group read the same piece with the signaling deleted.
Let’s pause and ponder that for a minute too.

The deletions had no effect on the ability of the best or worst students to remember and write down what they’d read. But those transitions did make a difference for average readers. With the signal words, the average students remembered more and organized the information better (Marshall 1976, Meyer 1975).

Form follows function.

Which transitions should you use? Let your story’s structure determine what kind of glue to choose.

Reading experts Joanne and Richard Vacca (1973) classify these types of internal transitions:

• Cause/effect: because, since, therefore, consequently, as a result, this led to, so that, nevertheless, accordingly, if … then.
• Compare/contrast: however, but, as well as, on the other hand, not only … but also, either … or, while although, unless, similarly, yet
• Time order: on (date), not long after, now, as, before, after, when
• Listing: to begin with … first … second …, next, then, finally

Use conjunctions and connectives.

Words like and, but, and or serve as “linguistic mortar” to explain the relationships among and between facts in your copy.

People prefer to read, are able to read faster and have better memory for sentences connected by explicit conjunctions, according to a host of research (Katz and Brent 1968, Marshall and Glock 1978-79, Pearson 1974-75).

For instance, in one study (Pearson 1974-75), this passage …

“Because John was lazy, he slept all day”

… performed better than this one:

“John was lazy. He slept all day.”

So don’t drop the transitions.

___

Sources: Robert C. Calfee, and R. Curley, “Structures of prose in content areas,” In Understanding reading comprehension, ed. J. Flood. Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 1984, pp. 161-180

Bonnie J. F. Meyer, “Reading Research and the Composition Teacher: The Importance of Plans, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Feb., 1982), pp. 37-49

Bonnie B. Armbruster, “The problem of inconsiderate text,” in Comprehension instruction, ed. G. Duffey. New York: Longmann, 1984, pp. 202-217

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