We have covered how to create summary details: create a description rich with sensory details, insert a key word or phrase that can trigger the memories of that rich description, then refer back to the rich description using the same word or phrase. We have not covered how to write a summary, that is, how […]

When I started writing this section, I went, “WHYYYYYYY am I bothering to write this? People shouldn’t be writing much summary anyway. Okay, I’ll mention it.” Then I went to The Princess Bride to pull up a few examples and really paid attention. Nearly every quote summarized something. I will grant you that part of

Writing the personas for work was interesting. I drew on the experience of a person in my marketing department who had FAR more experience in writing personas than I did, and double-checked with him on the process and whether my results made sense.  They did! It was so nice to get thrown into a new

I’m going to take what I hope to be a short side journey—short mostly because I have to test this stuff to see if it works—to talk about a new technique that I learned for my day job: writing personas. (I work as a content/SEO writer.) The human brain is weird. The general idea behind

I thought I had another episode of Writing Craft scheduled to post, but I DO NOT. I’ll get things sorted in a few days. My apologies!

If you’ve taken Kris & Dean classes, this is roughly analogous to what they call “fake details.” I don’t happen to find that term helpful, but you might! What I respond to is the idea that if you don’t create a detailed description of what you want the reader to imagine every time, then link

(This time, we talk about the other type of detail!) Going on Autopilot: Summary Details Now that I’ve explained how complex yet how beneficial using sensory details can be, let’s talk about summary details. It may seem like there isn’t much reason to use summary details: they don’t create verisimilitude and they aren’t memorable. However,

Ever since I heard of memory palaces, I’ve been fascinated by them! I don’t have one, or rather I don’t have much of one—I picked out a place (a childhood home that I remember clearly) and put things in it, but then didn’t “refresh” it or organize it. The information I put there has faded,

(This time we’ll talk about using location to sustain memory and how structure affects memory.) One of the strangest, but still logical, elements of memory is how we process location. The part of our brain that processes location is so strong that you can use it to “chunk” incredible amounts of information. Here’s how to

I feel like nothing I write here should be new to anybody—we know how to remember things, and we know what makes us forgetful—but I feel like finding out the reasons why we tend to remember or forget things can be incredibly helpful. Why do we forget things? Because it costs a lot of calories