Howard Becker's 2007 "Telling About Society" is a collection on a diverse ways to tell a story. This book is about the art of storytelling for social scientists, drawing on sociological roots. Useful reference book for thinking about communication, and in parts potentially manipulation and propaganda. A few notes:

"If you know the audience the makers want to reach, you can understand the features of any particular representations as the result of the makers' attempt to produce something that will reach those people in a form they will understand and approve. They will understand it because they have learned how to understand things like that, and they will approve it because it meets the standards they have acquired as part of that learning." (p. 67)

"When I taught field work, I made students crazy in the first weeks of the class by insisting that they write "more". A student who spent four hours in an auto repair shop would give me one page of notes, and I'd say it wasn't enough. It took weeks for them to see that I really meant they should write "everything," at least try to do it, and many more weeks for them to see that they couldn't do that and that what I wanted them to do was think through what they really wanted to know and write down as much as they could about that. And that only delayed the hard question, which was, what did they want to know? Because the trick in observing is to get curious about things you hadn't noticed before." (p. 98-99)

"I'm convinced that there is no best way to tell a story about society. Many genres, many methods, many formats – they can all do the trick. Instead of ideal ways to do it, the world gives us possibilities among which we can choose. Every way of telling about society does some of the job superbly, but other parts not so well. You can't maximize everything. Grownups have already learned this, but a lot of us forget it and get very righteous when it comes to methods of telling the story. That's not to say that no differences exist between ways of telling about society. Defenders of science will want to ask, whose map would you rather have: a trained cartographer's or one made by you friend who lives in the next county? Depends on what I need the map for…" (p. 285)