John Sokol heeft Randy Olson gelezen en schrijft,
The And, But, Therefore (ABT) narrative structure is considered the DNA of story that serves to organize the writer’s thoughts in a concise and compelling manner. ABT is the crux of any story. It contains the essential components of a narrative that needs to be conveyed so the reader understands what is happening.
The structure of ABT is the following: ________ and ________ , but ________ , therefore ________ Here is ABT applied to The Wizard of Oz: There is a little girl living on a farm in Kansas, and her life is boring, but one day a tornado sweeps her away to the land of Oz, therefore she must undertake a journey to find her way home.
Simple, concise, and gets the main message of the movie across. Extremely powerful. Once you create this template for a PowerPoint presentation for your day job or a semester long research paper, it is easy to reference your ABT-template as a roadmap to a single cohesive idea that you want the audience to take away from your findings.
The ABT follows the traditional three act play structure: beginning (thesis), middle (antithesis), and end (synthesis). The ‘And’ component establishes the situation, the ‘But’ establishes the conflict, and the ‘Therefore’ resolves the conflict. Olsen is credited for coining this template as ABT, but this narrative structure has actually been intertwined with story for centuries.
Although Olsen frequently bashes modern day scientists in his book, he acknowledges the communicative storytelling gifts of Watson and Crick, codiscoverers of the DNA molecule. It turns out they used the ABT-framework with their landmark paper Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids.
[Randy Olson was een marien bioloog, met een vaste positie aan een universiteit, wat hij steeds vermeldt. Maar hij was ongelukkig, dus maakte hij de overstap naar de filmacademie. Daar werd hij afgekat door een docent, dat schaamtevolle, genadeloze moment bleek zijn leven een cruciale wending te geven – en een missie. Nu vertelt hij wetenschappers wat ze kunnen leren van Hollywood: And, But, Therefore.]