Don T Be Such A Poor Storyteller Analysis

Olsen’s third chapter “Don’t Be Such a Poor Storyteller” (Olsen, 81) is one of his most powerful chapters where he dives deep into the heart of his suggestions. Good mass communicators are good storytellers. They tell a compelling story that allows the members of the audience to share in their experience and share their passion. Olsen begins this chapter like he does every other chapter with a personal story. This one is a hilarious story of Olsen and a girlfriend of his from the past. In the story he talks about how his girlfriend used to criticize him for telling boring stories. This is not a unique phenomenon. Scientist for decades have been criticized for their inability to tell a story to connect with a mass audience. In this chapter he
In this chapter Olsen goes into a lot of detail about the structure of stories and types of plots that he learned while in film school. He emphasizes that these lessons helped him to get his information out to the public in a productive way. Olsen emphasizes that a good story can connect to all the organs of mass communication at once. He breaks down storytelling into an objective part, that is the structure of the story, and the subjective part, that is the character of the story. The objective part is much easier for scientist to understand but the subjective part is just as important if not more so. The subjective part is what makes you fall out of you chair laughing or what pulls on your heart strings. It connects you to the story and forces you to feel. To be able to experience or write the subjective part you must stop thinking and start feeling. According to Olsen this is why scientist are so bad at it, they are hard wired to think first and ignore their emotions. This is imperative to unbiased scientific research but it will kill any movie or speech. People need to know why what you’re saying matters and listing off facts is not
I bet you’ve only heard of one of these movies though. Olsen citizises the movie Too hot to Handle for focusing too much on accuracy and not telling a story. While this movie is quite a bit more accurate than An Inconvenient Truth it did not connect with nearly as many people and was not nearly as influential. Too hot to Handle was full of actual scientist speking about the issues and an abundance of accurate data (Olsen, 108). This movie was also very boring and did not reach even a fraction of the people that Al Gores’s movie did. Al gore chose to combine his research about the risks of global warming with stories about his family and even some humor (Olsen, 108). By doing this he kept the audience entertained and made them care about the material. Even though all of his data was not perfect and most of his predictions were inaccurate he began a conversation with his story. Gore told a story about how climate change effects everyone around the world. He broke out of the overly analytical word of scientific acidemia and made a movie that changed how the world views climate