Book Review. Made to stick: why some ideas survive and others die

This book from 2007 was an easy and fun book to read. The book gives tactics for making ideas/concept stick in peoples minds. This is not just useful for marketing purposes, but also for teaching, presenting, and research exposition.

The book gives the following formula for stickiness: tell Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, and Emotional Stories.

SUCCESS! Acronyms help for stickiness.

Notice how close the advice in the "Talk like TED" book mirrors the advice here.

For me this is what stuck from the book. (Note that this follows the SUCCESS formula.)

Nora Ephron is a screenwriter whose scripts for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle have all been nominated for Academy Awards. Ephron started her career as a journalist for the New York Post and Esquire. She became a journalist because of her high school journalism teacher. 

Ephron still remembers the first day of her journalism class. Although the students had no journalism experience, they walked into their first class with a sense of what a journalist does: A journalist gets the facts and reports them. To get the facts, you track down the five Ws--- who, what, where, when, and why. 

As students sat in front of their manual typewriters, Ephron's teacher announced the first assignment. They would write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts: "Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund 'Pat' Brown." 

The budding journalists pecked away at the first lead of their careers. Most of them reordered the facts and condensed them into a single sentence like:
"Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento"... 

The teacher collected the leads, scanned them and set them down. Then he laid them aside and paused for a moment. Finally, he said "The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday." 

"It was a breathtaking moment," Ephron recalls. "In that instant I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn't enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered." For the rest of the year, she says, every assignment had a secret-- a hidden point that the students had to figure out in order to produce a good story.

This is very much the same for writing research papers. In case you missed, this is very relevant to the topic: How to write papers so they get accepted!

Here are some other related posts on presenting.
http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2016/06/how-to-package-your-ideas-using-winston.html
http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2017/08/on-presenting-well.html
http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2015/02/how-to-present-your-work.html
http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2020/01/how-to-speak-by-patrick-winston.html