Breaking the Rules • The Book
Breaking the Rules looks at stories and storytelling. Humans need stories. The book explores what techniques you can borrow and adapt from expert storytellers to make your technical writing more engaging, effective, memorable.
I often find non-fiction books are unnecessarily long, as if the authors want to pad their key insights to stretch them out into a “decent-sized” book. Breaking the Rules doesn’t do this. I kept it brief. Deliberately brief.
Here’s the book’s table of contents:
- preface
- one • narrative technical writing
- two • what’s your (current) writing style
- three • stories everywhere
- four • cognitive load
- five • analogies
- six • story-framing
- seven • narrating the technical detail
- eight • narrative writing style and language
- nine • your audience
- ten • a near-perfect picture
- scratchpad
- and now for the conclusion
The ten core chapters start by explaining what the narrative in narrative technical writing means. It’s not just about writing stories—it’s a lot more. Chapter two puts you in an inquisitive mindset, ready to think about your own writing.
Chapter three shows how stories are central to humans and how they communicate. Even neuroscientists found scientific evidence that our brains react differently when reading stories.
It’s all about cognitive load. Your role as a technical writer is to reduce your reader’s cognitive load to increase their attention span, their engagement, their understanding of the material and their long-term retention of it.
Chapters five to eight focus on the four key narrative techniques you can use in your technical writing. And chapters nine and ten get you thinking about your audience and about what it is that you’re really doing when you write a technical article.
Do you prefer an e-book or a paperback?
Stephen Gruppetta 