My most contrarian take on nonfiction writing is that the “power of storytelling” is way overrated. Doubtless there’s some incredibly broad sense in which “all good nonfiction writing is storytelling”, but it’s not a very useful sense, and I’ve definitely seen it cause people to freeze up because they don’t think they’ve got a good enough story or anecdote or case study to illustrate the thing they want to say. But it’s OK just to say the thing! (In any case, good anecdotes or examples are more likely to flow from doing that forthrightly, I think.) One of the reader emails I cherish the most was from the person who praised me for writing about things themselves instead of forever coyly sidling up to them by means of supposedly seductive illustrative tales; it is exactly what I hope I am doing.