galloway-storytelling

Galloway Storytelling

Rewrite writing so it stops the scroll and stays in the reader's head. This skill applies Scott Galloway's storytelling craft — a small set of concrete moves, each with a name, a rule, and a why. It edits by cutting and elevating, not by adding words.

The two laws (everything serves these)

1. Narrative > Numbers. "Data may be more truthful, but in the battle between narrative and numbers, most of the time humanity picks narrative." Lead with story; recruit the data to serve it.
2. Emotion > Insight. "Making people feel something bests any business insight." The smartest point loses to the one that lands in the gut. Every move below exists to manufacture a feeling — surprise, fear, relief, recognition, hope.

If a rewrite is clearer but colder, it failed. The goal is felt, not just tight.

How to use this skill

When a user gives you a draft (or asks you to write something more engaging):

1. Read the whole thing first and find its single best asset — the one surprising fact, number, or line. That becomes the hook and the spine. Everything else is either support or cut.
2. Apply the moves below, in roughly this order: run the Wow Test to cut, elevate the numbers that survive, fix the hook, then tighten the voice with Assume Intimacy.
3. Preserve the author's voice by default. Apply the structural moves, but keep their register, vocabulary, and personality. Sharpen; don't overwrite. Only shift fully into Galloway's punchy register if the user explicitly asks for it. If you're unsure whether a rewrite drifted, ask yourself: "would the original author recognize this as their own words, only better?"
4. Hand back two things: the rewritten version, then a short Moves applied list naming which techniques you used and why. The rationale teaches the user the craft — it's not filler. Keep it to a few bullets; name the move, name what you cut or changed.

Don't turn every draft into a Galloway pastiche. A calm, sincere piece can be sharpened without being made "provocative." Match the move to the material.

The moves

1. The Wow Test — the editing knife (do this first)

Rule: "If a data point, sentence, or slide doesn't challenge or surprise you, cut it."

The bar is not "is this true?" or "is this well-written?" — it's does this surprise? A sentence can be true, grammatical, and on-topic and still deserve to die, because it tells the reader something they already assumed. Most drafts are 60% throat-clearing: context the reader already has, transitions, qualifications, sentences that set up the good sentence. Galloway's prose feels electric because he deleted the connective tissue and left only the jolts.

Run it line by line: read each sentence in isolation, ask "did that surprise or challenge me?" "It's necessary context" is not a yes. Surprise is a yes. A vivid image is a yes. A number I can feel is a yes. If no → cut it, or merge two weak sentences into the one good line they were hiding.

✗ "We had a great month. We saw strong growth in signups and our users are really engaged, which is exciting for the team." ✓ "Signups doubled. The scary part: the users who'd never heard of us convert better than the ones who had."

Same month. One gets skimmed; one gets remembered. "Brevity signals directionality and confidence. It demonstrates that you are actually saying something."

2. Data Elevation — the signature move

Rule: Never state a big number raw. Translate it into something the body already understands.

The human brain did not evolve to feel "$364 billion" — it goes in one eye and out the other. Elevate every important figure into a concrete yardstick. Reach for one of four:

• Time — how long? "266M tax returns" → "7.9 billion hours doing taxes this year — about 900,000 years, three times longer than humans have existed."
• Size / distance — as big as? "$364B in capex" → "enough to build another International Space Station, dig the Channel Tunnel, run Japan's military for a year — and still buy everyone in Manhattan an iPhone."
• A familiar object — the banana. "0.1 microsieverts of radiation" → "eating two bananas gives you nearly twice that dose." (Note how this defuses fear with a kitchen item — elevation doesn't just clarify a number, it tells the reader how to feel about it.)
• A baseline — compared to what? "Nvidia is worth $4.5T" → "worth more, as a share of global GDP, than the entire stock markets of the U.K., France, and Germany combined."

Never skip the baseline. A number alone is mute. "AI data centers = 3.4% of carbon emissions" only lands once you know aviation is 2.5%. Always give the reader the yardstick.

The comparison must be true. Provocation only works anchored in fact; a stretch or a lie backfires. If you don't have a real, verifiable comparison, don't invent a number — either use a directional one ("nearly twice") or leave the figure raw rather than fabricate.

Small numbers elevate too, by inversion — turn "we had zero signups" into the felt version ("crickets. not a single one.") rather than hiding it behind a vibe-word.

3. The Hook — the first line's only job

Rule: The first line exists to make the second line unskippable. Lead with the most surprising thing you've got — never the setup.

"Even if you have revelatory information to share, it's not going to have an impact if no one's paying attention." The hook is the toll you pay to earn the reader's next five seconds.

Six types to reach for:

1. Number + Verdict — "$2,300/mo for a 1BR is wild." (a figure + how to feel about it)
2. Verb of Conflict — "I reverse-engineered the hidden filters and brought back the categories they killed." (you're a character doing something forbidden)
3. Curiosity Gap — "I had to google this to make sure it wasn't a joke." (withhold the payload; risky — only works if the payoff delivers)
4. Provocative Question — "Do we love our children?" (an obvious answer you then destabilize)
5. Contrarian Claim — "The era of the brand is over." (must be anchored in evidence)
6. Visceral Image — a picture the reader sees before they think.

The universal fix: if a draft opens with a date ("At the beginning of the year…"), a "so…", a humble adjective ("basic," "little," "just a"), or the brand/product name, that's a warm-up. Find the wildest line anywhere in the piece and move it to the top. Backfill the context after.

4. Assume Intimacy — the voice

Rule: "I assume the listener knows a lot and likes me, and I like them … so we can get to the point. We're friends."

If you assume the reader is smart and already likes you, then preamble, over-explanation, and hedging become insults — they imply the reader is slow or that you haven't earned their trust. Friends don't over-explain; they get to the point because the trust is already there.

The diagnostic: "The length and formality of the email is inversely correlated to your comfort with that person." Read backwards — when writing gets long and explanatory, it's a tell that the writer doesn't fully trust the reader (or their own line). Over-explaining isn't generosity; it's anxiety, and the reader feels it as distance.

The most common failure this fixes: the writer lands a knockout line, then keeps talking — explains the metaphor, softens the claim, narrates past it. The fix is almost always cut the second sentence, trust the first.

✗ "apartment hunting in nyc feels like the hunger games. everyone is scrapping and almost none gets out feeling good about it." ✓ "apartment hunting in nyc is the hunger games."

Kill list — hunt these; they're the texture of writing to a stranger: i think · i guess · it seems · kind of · sort of · probably · maybe · just · honestly · so… · basically · anyway · and any sentence that only restates the one before it.

The paradox: cutting these makes writing warmer, not colder. Formality is what's cold; a short direct line reads like a text from a friend.

5. More Drama — the revision stance

Galloway's editing note to his own team is never "soften this" — it's "more drama." Emotional intensity is added deliberately in revision; it is not an accident of the first draft. When a rewrite feels flat, ask: what's the most dramatic true framing of this? Push toward surprise, tension, stakes, and consequence — then anchor every provocation in evidence.

6. Zoom Out — from "what" to "so what"

Move past what happened to so what? what made this possible? what happens next? The reveal of an invisible cause or a downstream consequence is often the most surprising thing in the piece — and therefore the real hook. A flat draft frequently just needs its "so what" surfaced and promoted to the top.

When you need more

For the full worked examples, the extended technique catalog (the Crocs Test, Anchored Provocation, Vulnerability, Visualization), and Galloway's exact quotes with sources, read references/galloway-playbook.md. Pull it in when a draft is unusually hard, when the user wants deeper craft explanation, or when you want a wider menu of moves than the core set above.

The output shape

Return the rewrite, then the rationale. Adapt the labels to the medium, but keep this two-part structure:

**Rewritten:**
[the sharpened version]

**Moves applied:**
- [Move name] — [what you cut/changed and the one-line why]
- [Move name] — [...]

If the piece is long, you can rewrite section by section, but always lead with the strongest hook up top. If a specific number couldn't be elevated because you lacked a true comparison, say so rather than inventing one — the user can supply the real figure.