In this video, Jessica discusses how she made her book more ADHD friendly.

We attempt all of these things on our website at stimpunks.org.

• Lots of whitespace.
• Every page/screen has something breaking up the text. Break up text with pull quotes, blocks, bullets, bolding, backgrounds, images.
• Add attention getters like selective bolding and pull quotes.
• Write in conversational style.
• Organize so you don’t have to read it.
• Flip open right to your struggle. Allow people to pick up and go right to what they need.
• Format is the same for every chapter.
• Make it so people can just read the headers.
• Make it engaging and visual.
• Add in jokes and feelings.
• Put everything in one book so folks have one place to go.

How I Made My Book ADHD-Friendly 🧠📘 – YouTube

What would you do to make our scrollytelling style on stimpunks.org more ADHD-friendly?

We attempt some techniques from “Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History” on stimpunks.org.

A page of neat and tidy typed text in long paragraphs is the least memorable format known. You need to reduce it into small segments, each made memorable by flourishes and fancy layouts. Add colour and doodles. Highlight. Enclose with clouds. Write the whole portion backwards. Do anything to make each logical entity, each verse, distinct.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

The efficacy of short sentences on a memorable page resonates with my experience as a teacher. I have found that students who read an entire paragraph of information quickly will often claim they didn’t understand it, but if they read it phrase by phrase, stopping at each comma or full stop to ensure they understand, the entire paragraph becomes meaningful. With short sentences, you are forced to engage with each element of the information and not try to grasp the whole in a single befuddling quest.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

The important lesson for all of those wanting to memorise huge amounts of information is that the Navajo store this knowledge in their mythology. In stories. Vivid lively stories make information more memorable.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

I’ll explain how these methods correlate with the most recent discoveries in neuroscience, which show that associating memory with place is hardwired into our brains. This common factor is why cultures all over the world have developed similar methods: they are working with the same brain structure. The neuroscience explains how we benefit from repetition and music, and in particular the value of memory palaces.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

One of the most important lessons I have learned from indigenous cultures is the value of strong characters in stories. I cannot emphasise enough how useful this is.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

Indigenous cultures around the world don’t just use the vast landscape as a memory palace; they use a wonderfully integrated system of objects—portable memory devices—that are often simply referred to as ‘art’ and seen to have little practical purpose.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

many objects interpreted simply as artworks are mnemonic landscapes in miniature.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

The wilder, the more colourful and active, the more grotesque, vulgar or erotic the images and stories you create are, the more memorable they will be. That is the secret to making knowledge memorable.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

A memory palace is a structure, grounded in the landscape, offering a firm base on which to build a tower of knowledge to play with, analyse and think about—a way to ponder the big picture.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

As in classical times, memory training involved associating information with emotionally striking images in a set of ordered physical locations.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

But most important of all, the pages of the text had to stir the emotions to make the written word unforgettable.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

The elaborately decorated lists of numbers were written between illustrations of columns with arches above, reflecting the ancient memory advice to use inter-columnar spaces as locations for memory images. The vertical spaces between the columns were then divided by horizontal lines into small rectangular spaces, each holding no more than five items, the maximum number suggested for retaining in memory for a single location.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

Laying out the narrative in a grid of images makes it more memorable. Your brain will remember where a given rectangle in the grid lies in the space and hence recall the information.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

Many of the stories are painted in grids, some of the most famous examples being three cells by four cells, as in Plate 23. The images are not only unique but positioned in a unique location on the page.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

Hugh recommended using grids of cells to memorise large swathes of text. For example, for the 150 psalms, he recommended that the beginning phrase of the first verse be placed in a cell. The cells were placed in a line of 150 locations. For each psalm, he then imagined another set of numbered cells, one for each verse.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

Of course, you could get really enthusiastic and design stained-glass windows for your home based on the narratives of knowledge you want to share. Many church windows were laid out in grid structures to make the narrative easy to follow for the illiterate congregation. Medieval churches boasted glorious colourful images in sequences of stained glass, each telling a small part of the story. Staring at those superb windows week after week ensured that the stories of the Bible were well entrenched in medieval minds.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

Whenever you need to learn an abstract theme, give it a character.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

In the pious Middle Ages, violent, lewd and fanciful images were deemed highly inappropriate. I am delighted to report that Albertus justified their use because, ironically, they were so effective for memorising moral philosophies.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

In her seminal work, The Art of Memory, Frances Yates wrote: ‘If Simonides was the inventor of the art of memory and “Tullius” its teacher, Thomas Aquinas became something like its patron saint.’1

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

We love hyperlinks and use them extensively. We consider them a kindness to the reader and a potent weapon in the fight against disinformation. Many of our links lead to our expansive glossary.

We love Stimpunks, their Glossary is a rich source of information presented through an affirming lens. Be more Punk! 🤘🏻✊🏾 https://stimpunks.org/glossary-list/#h-all-glossary-entries

Pebble Autism on X

We use block quotations (blockquote) heavily. We quote our favorite passages and sources with hyperlinks signposting back to the original work.

We also heavily use “accordions”. Accordions contain more in depth information on a topic that you can reveal at your own pace.

We often break paragraphs of text down into bulleted lists that present one idea per line in plain language.

We provide content hierarchy, visual hierarchy, and tables of contents.

We group related elements together in color blocks.

We are iterating toward “digital stories” and “Web-Based Conceptual Portmanteau”.

Consume this content to the depth and breadth of your preference in whatever way and order works for you.

This website is a living document that you can contribute to under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. Send us your suggestions and favorite quotes and resources.

We provide “Main Takeaways” on many pages. Main takeaways are presented with one idea per line in a bulleted list format. If you don’t have time or energy to read an entire page, reading just the main takeaways will give you what you most need to know.

Readers on the web scan for information, rather than reading everything line-by-line. Chunking your content into smaller sections, called out by larger headings, helps them find the information they’re searching for.

When I’m trying to find something quickly, there’s nothing more intimidating than jumping onto a site with a giant wall of unbroken content. 

Show, Don’t Tell | CSS-Tricks – CSS-Tricks

Where possible, break down paragraphs into lists. Lists make scanning easier!

Show, Don’t Tell | CSS-Tricks – CSS-Tricks

bold the most important part of a sentence to make sure that readers scanning through your content catch their eyes on what’s most important.

Show, Don’t Tell | CSS-Tricks – CSS-Tricks

Show, then tell. Start with concrete examples & pictures, then lay down the abstract definitions.

Nutshell: make expandable, embeddable explanations

Our Rules for Scrollytelling

• Accordions expand/infodump on a topic without interrupting the main flow.
• Accordions labelled “What is…” provide definitions, context, and further reading.
• Accordions labelled “In other words…” explain things in different ways, including easy read, one idea per line, and plain language summaries.
• One line inline definitions are offered.
• Explanatory items are grouped into “What does this mean?” blocks.
• Related items are grouped together on a colored background with a group title. This makes it easier to tell what’s in a group and skim past it.
• Pick colors for groups based on colors in included media, if any.
• Pick colors for groups of accordions based on themes like rainbow.
• Lots of whitespace.
• Every page/screen has something breaking up the text.
• Selective bolding of key sentences facilitates skimming.
• A table of contents is provided near the top of each page.
• Headings are used approximately every 5 screens (on a laptop) or less.
• 20 headings max.
• Put a “coming up” table of contents after 10 headings.
• Consider putting a “Bodymind Break” section after 10 headings.
• Spacers are used as pause points, fermata.
• Spacers are used before headings to accentuate the break.
• Long scrollytelling stories signpost to what’s ahead.
• Break up text with pull quotes, blocks, bullets, bolding, backgrounds, images.
• Use lists to present one idea per line.
• Make it so people can just read the headers, table of contents and get the gist of the page/section.
• Make it engaging and visual.
• Write in a conversational style.
• Add in jokes and feelings.

There’s more about our scrollytelling conventions in our explainer at “📚🌈♿️ An Encyclopedia of Disability and Difference”

The content on our website is designed to be engaging and accessible to a wide range of readers. We have adopted a multimedia, multi-modality, scrollytelling style, which means that information is presented in a visually engaging and interactive manner.

When you visit our website, you will notice that the main concepts are presented at the top of the page using simpler language. This allows you to quickly grasp the key ideas without getting overwhelmed by technical jargon. As you scroll down, you will find more detailed explanations and academic language for those who want to delve deeper into the topic.

We understand that everyone has different preferences when it comes to consuming content. That’s why we encourage you to read at your own pace and to the depth that you feel comfortable with. If you don’t have the time to explore an entire page or section, you can still gain a good understanding by focusing on the main ideas presented at the beginning.

We want you to have a flexible and customizable experience on our website. Feel free to consume the content in any way and order that works best for you. Whether you prefer to skim through the main points or dive into the nitty-gritty details, our goal is to provide you with valuable information in a format that suits your needs.