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Re:The building blocks of understanding are memorization and... by danso on Thursday September 15, 2016 @03:47PM (#12509220)
A lot of people connect with concepts via story-telling. Life lessons aren't always learned by just consuming a stream of facts. And facts themselves aren't inherently valuable. A good story helps some readers filter what applies to them and what does not.
Re:The building blocks of understanding are memorization and... by r_smart on Friday September 16, 2016 @10:41AM (#12514307)
I recently picked up the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People". It's full of story telling, with very little fact, and the main thrusts of each chapter are summarized in a sentence. The bulk of the chapters is mostly just stories.

Overall this seems like a really effective strategy for the subject matter. It's easy to intellectually understand the summary sentences, but all the stories in the chapters are illustrative, and the idea is that spending time with the book helps reinforce the mindset that leads to the attitudes it espouses.

So that was a long winded way of saying: Good point.

I will say that a lot of long form journalism pieces these days seem overly focused on their narratives, and often, feel like time wasting to me. But I'm usually in information gathering mode when I read them. I don't want personal stories, I want facts, and links to research when I'm in that mindset. Maybe it just feels to me like they are too often considering the story they're telling as proof enough of their point without doing enough to support it otherwise.

Re:The building blocks of understanding are memorization and... by chairleader on Thursday September 15, 2016 @03:49PM (#12509236)
Agreed. I filed this story away as a way to explain math-centric learning to the more literary minded.
Re:The building blocks of understanding are memorization and... by lolive on Friday September 16, 2016 @08:09AM (#12513430)
Especially in our modern time where our mind spends its time curating zillion of tiny messages to extract meaningful messages.