alt Hacker NewsI always insist that education is not storytelling and should not be structured as such. People want to save "twists" and "revelations" for maximum impact and it's harmful. It should actually be the other way around and be, keeping the theme, "spoilery" and repetitive. Like a good presentation you should start by saying what you'll say, say it, then conclude by saying what you said.
LLMs have made this problem extremely worse. Imagine how'd you'd explain what an MCP is in a couple words and technically, then try to look it up. There's phone books worth of pages and text that never end up getting to the point.
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My undergraduate research advisor told me "Papers and presentations are not murder mysteries." I try to keep that in mind whenever I approach explanatory writing, because the purpose is to help the audience reach understanding of where you ended up, not to replicate the epiphany you had yourself.
There's phone books worth of pages and text that never end up getting to the point.
I don't know if it's still there, but Grammarly used to have an AI feature that specifically made text longer. It was literally a button that says "Make longer."
I think the appropriate level of "storytelling" depends on the type of blog post. A "bug hunt" type of post is often told as a detective story. A benchmark post has almost zero storytelling. Different purposes warrant different approaches.
If I am reading a cookbook, tutorial, or reference to teach myself quickly so that I can accomplish something specific, I completely agree with you. Blog posts can teach something, of course, but when I choose to read a blog, I am hoping to experience a bit of the writer's personality and to be entertained in the process. Storytelling accomplishes both nicely. Also, when I read a blog post, I am not in a rush and don't want to feel like I should be.
I agree that education is not storytelling, but I think that storytelling can be a useful tool for education.
A lot of Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky posts don't get straight to the point and usually do not follow an intro -> body -> conclusion format. A lot of them start with a story that makes the direction of the post unclear[0] or include long digressions whose value isn't immediately obvious.[1]
For a while, I struggled with this contradiction because I think good writing should quickly demonstrate the value a reader can expect, but I think Graham and Spolsky are excellent writers that frequently take their time in getting to their point.
The easy answer is that Graham and Spolsky are famous, so they can do whatever they want, and people will still read. I've come to think it's actually that writers like Graham and Spolsky are so good that the quality of the writing itself is the thing of value that keeps you interested even if you don't know what point they're going to make.
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
[1] https://paulgraham.com/worked.html