In previous posts, I've mentioned that I read All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin and that I am in the process of reading Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath.

While they cover different aspects, both books talk about what makes a message or story sticky. But that's not what I'm going to write about in this entry.

I'm going to write about the way the books are written.

Godin has a distinctive writing style; he wrote the book as if he was writing for the web. Lots and lots of subtitles and a fair amount of repetition.

I'll come clean here and say that I was unimpressed with this. It seemed unnecessarily simple for a book. After all, he's writing for an intelligent audience; we can follow an argument without a lot of hand holding in the form of subtitles.

Then I started Made to Stick. The authors are building a fairly complicated, but interesting, argument. The book is well written and I'm often struck by the ideas in it.

The problem is that on a good day I get 30 minutes of reading in, generally during my commute on the train. My reading is too interrupted to be able to follow the authors' argument as closely as it deserves.

Godin has apparently made a shrewd observation (or maybe just fell into a happy accident): Marketers are busy people; a certain amount of hand holding is good for communicating an idea.

The apparent simplicity of approach that Godin uses in his structure wouldn't be necessary in a novel. In a novel, there's a story to follow which anchors the details in the reader's mind.

Building an argument follows a different structure, though. It's not a narrative; it's a series of ideas and facts that are cited to establish the truth of a hypothesis. Because there's no narrative structure to give the facts and information form, it's easier to lose track of the details and therefore lose the thread of the argument.