Use anecdotes - Eleven ways to make people like what you write

100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Use anecdotes
Eleven ways to make people like what you write

An anecdote is a little story or incident that makes a point about your subject. The word comes from the Greek anekdota, which means “things unpublished,” and ideally your anecdote should be an unpublished incident you discovered in your research. Anecdotes are great reader pleasers. They are written like fiction, often contain dialogue, and reduce a large issue to a comprehensible size by making it personal. Anecdotes crystallize a general idea in a specific way.

Writing a short, colorful anecdote is one of the most compelling ways to begin an article, query letter, or business proposal, and a couple of well-placed anecdotes in your longer stories will break the lock of formality and win your reader’s affection as well as his or her attention.

Here is an anecdote I used to begin a magazine article about psychics.

When Mal Brown of Leominster was a kid, he fell out of an apple tree, got one leg knotted in a branch, tipped upside down, and was yanked to a stop.

It was a mishap that Brown believes could have killed or seriously injured him, but it didn’t. And he believes it didn’t because the Tibetan monk was with him.

“That was the first time I saw the Tibetan monk,” says Brown, now the 35-year-old father of three daughters.

Brown says the Tibetan monk, a vision that never speaks, has been with him all his life, helping him out in jams, appearing at moments of jeopardy, offering reassurance that danger will pass.