At first her strummed-and-murmured songs seem confessional, as if she's telling too much.
A third story, La Mort de L'Amant, by Stuart Johnstone, in which a man is stopped by police with a body in the back of his truck, demonstrated the importance of not telling too much, as did Neil Hudson's post-apocalyptic The Bear Trap, in which a boy, apparently surviving in a cabin on his own, faces down an armed man.
The decision to give pride of place to Ms. Roberts's raw first-person footage and to grant the Robertses a guiding role in the documentary was both generous and astute, a way for Mr. Deal and Ms. Lessin to avoid telling too much of the story across the divides of race and class.
Mr. Grigely's interlocutors used scraps of paper, which for years he simply threw away, the paper seeming to him as ephemeral as most of the conversations, until one day during the early 1990's he noticed the scribbled scraps scattered around a table and thought that maybe they "told a story," he said, "without telling too much".
There was a clear preferential ranking by employers in terms of the letters that elicited job interviews: People without a disability were most favored, followed by people with hearing impairments, then people who relied on crutches to walk, and lastly, people who were depressed.¹ Such results can make anyone skittish about telling too much too soon.
Tell people who you are, without telling too much information.
