How to engage people’s interest is neither a new problem nor an intractable one. Novelists, screenwriters and comedians have been figuring out this craft for as long as they have existed. They know that we love mysteries, are drawn in by sympathetic characters, enjoy the arc of a good story, and will stick around for anything that makes us laugh. And scientific evidence suggests that Orson Welles was absolutely right: for example, studies in which people were asked to read narratives and non-narrative texts found that they zipped through the narrative at twice the speed, and recalled twice as
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