My daughter is progressing through high school and is now asked more and more to write essays with her opinion. This got me to think about four levels of writing a story:

1. Without having a clear idea of the answer/plot, you start jotting down your thoughts with the main objective of reaching the total word count, and buzzword count targets. This gets you a fail on an exam, and you can also compare this to an unprepared presenter “winging it”.

2. You write a skeleton of the points you want to make, in the right order, with main headings and sub bullets, all in super short grammatically incorrect and incomplete language (because you are the only person who needs to understand it). This is probably what the high school teacher is trying to reverse engineer from the full essay when grading it: did she make the right points.

3. The skeleton, but now expanded into proper language. It makes the point, it is logical and organised, it is grammatically correct, but also, it is pretty boring. This would be a typical exam submission of a student, or a management consulting report

4. A convincing story, that abandons some of the logical rigour of the previous level and replaces it with an interesting flow, with some tension that resolves to the conclusion. As opposed to “winging it”, this is a story that a skilled salesperson can pull off on the fly without any slides or skeletons. Very few business documents or high school essays make it to this level.

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