PROPAGANDA / A CRAFT BIBLE · CHAPTER 10
Chapter 10 / 16
Story and Identification
A story pulls the audience inside it, where they argue back less and feel with the characters.
Build a story the audience enters, with characters they side with, so the claim rides in on the plot instead of standing out for inspection.
Why it works
Inside a story, the audience stops arguing back
Melanie Green and Timothy Brock measured transportation in 2000: the feeling of being lost in a story. The more a reader is transported, the less they argue back against the story’s claims, the more real the events feel, and the stronger their feeling toward the characters. A claim carried inside a gripping story meets less resistance than the same claim stated flat.
Kenneth Burke named identification: a speaker builds enough shared ground with the audience that they treat the speaker’s cause as their own. Burke called this consubstantiality. A character the audience sees themselves in carries their loyalty wherever the plot goes.
Transportation gets the audience inside a story; identification decides whom they side with once there. A story that pulls the audience in and hands them a character to become moves belief with no claim they can stop and check.
When to use it
Use a story when a plain claim would be resisted
- The audience would argue back against a plain claim. Put the claim inside a story so they feel it before they judge it.
- You want the audience to side with a person or a cause. Give them a character to enter and stay with.
- The matter is abstract. Show it through one person’s experience so the audience lives it rather than weighs it.
- You want the claim to stay after the details fade. A story is easier to remember and retell than an argument.
How to do it
Build the story
- Choose one character the audience can enter, and show the matter through that character’s eyes.
- Open with something that pulls the audience in fast: a scene, a voice, a problem, so they are inside before they are on guard.
- Let the claim live in what happens, not in a line of argument. The character’s experience should carry the point.
- Give the audience someone to side with and someone to side against, and make the sides clear early.
- Keep the reader moving so they do not stop to argue. Momentum is what lowers counterarguing.
- End on the feeling you want carried out of the story, tied to the character the audience has become.
What it captures
What story and identification capture
A story captures the audience’s guard by pulling them inside, where they argue back less. It captures their loyalty by giving them a character to become. It captures memory, since people keep and retell stories more than arguments. The claim rides out with the feeling, attached to the character the audience sided with.
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