Humans love stories. We need them. Societies are built on stories.
But narrative technical writing isn’t just about telling stories. It’s also about using the techniques storytellers use to deliver their stories.
Breaking the Rules makes the case for narrative technical writing. It explores through history and science why stories are central to humans and shows how you can adapt storytelling techniques to your technical writing.
Curious? Get a copy of the short book—available in paperback ($18) or e-book ($8)
Breaking the Rules doesn’t tell you how to write technical articles. It’s not one of those “follow these 7 steps to 10x your writing and earn $$$” books or courses.
Instead, Breaking the Rules will get you to ask questions about your technical writing and give you the information and tools to answer your own questions, to find what works for you. You decide which rules you want to break when you write.
Breaking the Rules • The Book
I often find non-fiction books are unnecessarily long, as if the authors want to pad their key insights to stretch them out into a “decent-sized” book. Breaking the Rules doesn’t do this. I kept it brief. Deliberately brief.
Here’s the book’s table of contents:
- preface
- one • narrative technical writing
- two • what’s your (current) writing style
- three • stories everywhere
- four • cognitive load
- five • analogies
- six • story-framing
- seven • narrating the technical detail
- eight • narrative writing style and language
- nine • your audience
- ten • a near-perfect picture
- scratchpad
- and now for the conclusion
The ten core chapters start by explaining what the narrative in narrative technical writing means. It’s not just about writing stories—it’s a lot more. Chapter two puts you in an inquisitive mindset, ready to think about your own writing.
Chapter three shows how stories are central to humans and how they communicate. Even neuroscientists found scientific evidence that our brains react differently when reading stories.
It’s all about cognitive load. Your role as a technical writer is to reduce your reader’s cognitive load to increase their attention span, their engagement, their understanding of the material and their long-term retention of it.
Chapters five to eight focus on the four key narrative techniques you can use in your technical writing. And chapters nine and ten get you thinking about your audience and about what it is that you’re really doing when you write a technical article.
Do you prefer an e-book or a paperback?
One-to-One Mentorship
I plan to offer a very limited number of one-to-one memberships soon for those who are serious about making changes to their writing and want direct access to me through live meetings. Contact me directly if you’re interested.
Are you a technical writer who wants to explore how to change your writing? Or are you planning to start writing soon? Are you curious about bringing storytelling techniques into technical writing?
It’s time to start Breaking the Rules…
Stephen Gruppetta 
