Hey friend,
How are you? I hope you’re nicely easing into 2025.
Today, I’d like to share a simple storytelling tip we often fail to recognize its importance.
As I’m sure you know, your story can be delivered in various containers; a blog post, presentation, investor pitch deck, sales one-pager, or verbal elevator speech.
When you think about it, your story is nothing but a string of events.
The trick is not to overload your story arc with every detail possible, as you risk boring your audience.
To maximize message clarity, you want to choose the most intriguing elements that support your big idea and set the specific emotions for your plot.
A simple way of achieving this is by showing vs. telling, using actions, dialogues, and visuals to convey meanings.
This is especially true with pitch decks, where you want to leave some space for developing a dialogue with your investors.
This is also true for any audience you present to where you practically have two communication channels: textual via slides and verbal.
By letting your audience wonder about the unspoken details, subtext, and implied emotions - you give them an active role in completing the rest or in a live delivery - by asking you questions.
Think of your favorite movie where you toyed with several reasons why a particular scene didn’t provide a full explanation for the plot.
It’s different for project plans or product manuals where you want to minimize questions.

Letting your audience complete the missing details of a story in their heads is also true when you use visuals. I covered this in:
In closing, to bring this idea to life for you, think of your story as a boat nicely gliding above the water line.
What your audience doesn’t see are underwater - the implied other details of the story and subtext or moral.
Keep this boundary between the carefully selected visible and invisible details of your story. You’ll then open up the door for deeper interactions and engagement with your audience.
I hope I whetted your appetite enough to explore this further :)
See you next time!
Best,
- Shlomi
Shlomi Ron
Chief Storytelling Officer
shlomi@visualstorytell.com
Visual Storytelling Institute
story > visual > emotion > experience