I wrote about the HECBSW format. Humans > Emotions > Brand/Content > Symbols > World
Essentially everything in material that is designed to persuade someone shall center everything around the humans. The content is serving the humans and the world is serving the content. Content is the middle point where you select the emotions from humans which you want to touch and the symbols from the world which you want to imbibe into your content. At all given moments humans are the thing which you are bowing down to. Having the wrong posture just eliminates you from the game.
I have observed something about an Instagram page that has a huge following for something really complicated. It’s not the scripts themselves that have a lot of scientific shit going on. They talk to you on a really human level. It is the visual and the annotations that appear on screen that are heavily scientific. The opening lines are very low barrier to entry. They either go for self-awareness or ask you to choose something or decide something between two things. Or maybe discuss something that is generally controversial, like, “Why do girls like bad boys?” or bullshit like that.
Yeah, interactive hooks are a thing here. Either they tap into your emotions and you start interacting with it emotionally, or you are making a choice literally because they are asking you to.
Type 1: Make a literal choice/comparison
"If you had to guess which model is African and which is African American..."
"Which of these two faces look older?"
"Take a look at these two models. Which would you describe as black and which as white?"
Type 2: Interactive self-assessment (emotional engagement)
"Let's test if your face makes a more masculine or feminine impression. Put a finger up if..."
The finger counting creates literal physical engagement + taps into curiosity/insecurity about how they're perceived
Type 3: Provocative statement (emotional trigger)
"Women around the world are fawning over this man's looks now..."
"Why do the women that guys want to hook up with look so different from the women that guys want committed relationships with?"Scripts are almost like playwriting. You have to think about the set, the characters, the props, and all the things in playwriting. Considerations of similar natures have to be made for scripts also. Even if they are for some Instagram video.
It’s like not every sentence is equal. Some sentences are easier to not only grab attention but also narrate and also visually represent. There are three boxes to tick, not just one. You have to make sure that each sentence is optimal for all three:
- Visuals
- Attention
- Narration
❌ "The mechanical load is distributed evenly"
Visuals: 3/10 (engineering concept, not facial)
Attention: 2/10 (puts people to sleep)
Narration: 5/10 (sounds like a textbook)
Total: 10/30 - DELETE
✅ "When you're missing one or both helpers, your main muscle does all the work"
Visuals: 8/10 (diagram showing one vs three muscles active)
Attention: 8/10 (clear consequence they understand)
Narration: 9/10 (conversational, easy to say)
Total: 25/30 - KEEPMaybe scoring a sentence out of 30 points can improve our process significantly. That way, no matter what we are talking about, we can always make it good enough for the screens and masses.
| Score | VISUALS (Can this be shown?) | ATTENTION (Does this hook/maintain?) | NARRATION (Does this sound natural?) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9-10 | Instant Visual Gold – Viewers picture it immediately; multiple strong visual options; perfect metaphors | Hook/Revelation – “Wait, what?” moment; provocative, counterintuitive, deeply relatable | Perfect Flow – Could be improvised speech; punchy, effortless to say aloud |
| 7-8 | Clear Visual – Specific, easy to represent; obvious what to show on screen | Engaging – Creates curiosity or relatability; makes viewer want more | Conversational – Sounds like natural human speech; easy flow |
| 4-6 | Vague/Generic – Could show something but not specific or compelling | Neutral/Okay – Informational but not exciting; no emotional pull | Readable But Stiff – Grammatically fine but sounds written, not spoken |
| 0-3 | Abstract/Impossible – Concepts, feelings, academic terms with no clear visual | Sleep-Inducing – Academic, obvious, or overly technical without payoff | Unreadable – Tongue twisters, awkward phrasing, loses the listener |
Example
| Sentence | Visuals | Attention | Narration | Total | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| “Your face has three smile muscles: major, minor, and risorius, and not everyone has all of them.” | 6 | 6 | 5 | 17 | ⚠️ REWRITE |
| “When you smile, you are using three muscles, and you might be missing a few.” | 7 | 8 | 8 | 23 | ✅ KEEP |
It also means you have to let go of your blog mindset that, when you’re writing a blog, all you have is words. You have to describe everything you possibly can so that there is no context loss. When it comes to script writing you have to have a lot more hands-free approach with the words because there are going to be visuals that are going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting. So you have to fight the urge of trying to explain everything by word and leave room for visuals to do their job. Where due to absence of any visuals, a blog might need 2-3 sentences. Sometimes, in a video, a single sentence can do that because there is visual reference. So in script writing less can actually be more.
Up till now when I think about writing a script, I just reduce the word count of what would be a normal blog post. I haven’t actually helped in visualization or narration in any way. I just went up to the word count and thought about duration. So by spirit it was still a blog post and not a script. That means scripts contain sentences that are fundamentally different than what is in a blog.
I think I can benefit a lot from storyboarding while writing script. I shouldn’t just raw dog it like I do with a blog.
I need to explore the part more where I go that ‘hey, you have to take off a lot of responsibility from words and give it to visuals and narration.’ If you are trying to write a script and still overuse words and underuse visuals, you are doing great harm. You are not being human-centric. You are not putting humans at the top if you are doing that.
Assume for any content the people watch, they are going to spend 100 points in a blog. All 100 are being spent on the words but in a script or for video words are going to receive only around 20 to 30 points. Everything else, the eye is going to dominate. So you have to take away the emphasis from the words and transfer it to the other two. Essentially, word is not the only tool you have and you are under compulsion to use the other two tools also. So budget accordingly and write accordingly. It’s like an old-time warrior just used to fight with swords but now he has guns and bombs in his arsenal. Also it’s stupid to not use.
This means visual story boarding has to be part of the writing process somewhere, either start with it or write a big block-type thing and then try to adapt it but I think the earlier you incorporate the better. Because the longer you go without storyboarding at start, the more rigid the words have become. You cannot retrofit visuals and narration properly on it. Even a rough storyboard forces you to confront whether a sentence is actually visualizable.
This whole thing can be summarized as switching from high-context writing to low-context writing because you are going to source a lot of it from visuals and narration. You have to restrain your hands from sprinkling in more context inside the words and try to shape them in a way that is beneficial for narration and visuals. High-context writing assumes words must carry all the meaning, so you pack everything into the text. Low-context writing assumes meaning is distributed across multiple channels, so words become lean and deliberately play a smaller role.
Blog writing is necessarily high-context because there's nothing else. You have to write "the zygomaticus major muscle contracts to pull the corners of your mouth upward during a smile" because the reader has no diagram, no arrows, no visual reference. The words must generate the entire mental picture. But in a script, that same high-context sentence is just waste. It's spending 40 word-points on something that a simple diagram with one arrow spends 5 visual-points on.I guess you have to train between switching from high context to low context mode but to do that well you have to also develop a mind that is able to fill in the blanks using the visual and narrative context. That means script writing is not only about words but also visuals and narration. You need to develop the ability to read your own script while simultaneously hallucinating the visuals and hearing the narration.
It’s a good idea to put yourself in the shoes of the audience but as a blogger you only put yourself in the shoes of a reader. For scripts here to put yourself in the shoes of a watcher.
You don’t have to just write differently; you have to also read differently. That way you can evaluate your scripts better.