Presenting, Sequential Art, Archetypes and Abstrations

I mentioned a whole flock of books on presenting that came out in the past 5 or 6 years. My favorites include  The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting by Stanley K. Ridgely and HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations  by Nancy Duarte both of which emphasize the use of stories as the backbone of a presentation.

But, when it comes to advise on how to construct a story, there is precious little help. We get such tired heuristics such as Beginning, Middle and End. But, that is not particularly useful to one trying to figure out a narrative argument to bolster their presentation. So, how does one construct a compelling narrative? Once again, graphic novels come to the rescue. For example Will Eisner the man who coined the term "graphic novel" provides two works Comics and Sequential Art
and Graphical Storytelling and Visual Narrative which do provide some structure.  If we think of a presentation as sequential art they provide a framework for thinking through the storyline.

Another benefit that the graphic novel format provides is the use of archetypes. Archetypes are symbols for bundles of human behavior that tend to occur together. Archetypes provide us with a high level of intellectual economy where we don't have to read long passages which describe behaviors that we have to infer character traits from. Instead we are given an archetype with which we are familiar that is customized for use in the story. One might argue that this is a response to the short attention span that we have developed in this age of text and distractions. But, I see it as stepping back another level of abstraction in our knowledge

To understand this level of abstraction consider a simple cognitive function of counting. First we count on our fingers, then pencil and paper where numbers represent quantity, then on a calculator where the computations are done for us and finally on a computer where the computations are embedded in a procedure. As our knowledge grows it become increasingly important to organize our knowledge base into levels of abstraction and select the level of abstraction that is necessary for educating us with the things we need to know. It seems like graphic novels may be the next level of abstraction for a rapidly expanding knowledge base.