Feldman was referring to things like vocabulary and grammar and — most important — the structure of Emily's monologues. She was making up stories, narratives that explained and organized the things that happened to her. Sometimes these stories were what linguists call temporal narratives. She would create a story to try to integrate events, actions, and feelings into one structure — a process that is a critical part of a child's mental development. Here is a story Emily told herself at 32 months, which I will quote at length to emphasize just how sophisticated children's speech is when they are by themselves:

Tomorrow when we wake up from bed, first me and Daddy and Mommy, you, eat breakfast eat breakfast like we usually do, and then we're going to play and then soon as Daddy comes, Carl's going to come over, and then we're going to play a little while. And then Carl and Emily are both going down the car with somebody, and we're going to ride to nursery school [whispered], and then when we get there, we're all going to get out of the car, go into nursery school, and Daddy's going to give us kisses, then go, and then say, and then we will say goodbye, then he's going to work and we're going to play at nursery school. Won't that be funny? Because sometimes I go to nursery school cause it's a nursery school day. Sometimes I stay with Tanta all week. And sometimes we play mom and dad. But usually, sometimes, I, um, oh go to nursery school. But today I'm going to nursery school in the morning. In the morning, Daddy in the, when and usual, we're going to eat breakfast like we usually do, and then we're going to… and then we're going to… play. And then we're, then the doorbell's going to ring, and here comes Carl in here, and then Carl, and then we are all going to play, and then…

Emily is describing her Friday routine. But it's not a particular Friday. It's what she considers an ideal Friday, a hypothetical Friday in which everything she wants to happen happens. It is, as Bruner and Joan Lucariello write in their commentary on the segment,

a remarkable act of world making… she uses tonal emphasis, prolongation of key words, and a kind of "reenactment'' reminiscent of the we-are-there cinema verite (with her friend Carl practically narrated through the door as he enters). As if to emphasize that she has everything "down pat" she delivers the monologue in a rhythmic, almost singsong way. And in the course of the soliloquy, she even feels free to comment on the drollness of the course that events are taking ("Won't that be funny").

It is hard to look at this evidence of the importance of narrative and not marvel at the success of Sesame Street. Here was a show that eschewed what turns out to be the most important of all ways of reaching young children. It also diluted its appeal to preschoolers with jokes aimed only at adults. Yet it succeeded anyway. That was the genius of Sesame Street, that through the brilliance of its writing and the warmth and charisma of the Muppets it managed to overcome what might otherwise have been overwhelming obstacles. But it becomes easy to understand how you would make a children's show even stickier than SesameStreet. You'd make it perfectly literal, without any wordplay or comedy that would confuse preschoolers. And you'd teach kids how to think in the same way that kids teach themselves how to think — in the form of the Story. You would make, in other words, Blue's Clues.

Every episode of Blue's Clues is constructed the same way. Steve, the host, presents the audience with a puzzle involving Blue, the animated dog. In one show the challenge is to figure out Blue's favorite story. In another, it is to figure out Blue's favorite food. To help the audience unlock the puzzle. Blue leaves behind a series of clues, which are objects tattooed with one of his paw prints. In between the discovery of the clues, Steve plays a series of games — mini-puzzles — with the audience that are thematically related to the overall puzzle. In the show about Blue's favorite story, for example, one of the mini-puzzles involves Steve and Blue silting down with the Three Bears, whose bowls of porridge have been mixed up, and enlisting the audience's help in matching the small, middle, and large bowls with Mama, Papa, and Baby Bear. As the show unfolds, Steve and Blue move from one animated set to another, from a living room to a garden to fantastical places, jumping through magical doorways, leading viewers on a journey of discovery, until, at the end of the story, Steve returns to the living room. There, at the climax of every show, he sits down in a comfortable chair to think — a chair known, of course, in the literal world of Blue'sClues, as the Thinking Chair. He puzzles over Blue's three clues and attempts to come up with the answer.

This much is, obviously, a radical departure from Sesame Street. But having turned their back on that part of the Sesame Street legacy, the creators of Blue's Clues then went back and borrowed those parts of Sesame Street that they thought did work. In fact, they did more than borrow. They took those sticky elements and tried to make them even stickier. The first was the idea that the more kids are engaged in watching something — intellectually and physically — the more memorable and meaningful it becomes. "I'd noticed that some segments on Sesame Street elicited a lot of interaction from kids, where the segments asked for it," says Daniel Anderson, who worked with Nickelodeon in designing Blue's Clues. "Something that stuck in my mind was when Kermit would hold his finger to the screen and draw an animated letter, you'd see kids holding their fingers up and drawing a letter along with him. Or occasionally, when a Sesame Street character would ask a question, you'd hear kids answer out loud. But Sesame Street just somehow never took that idea and ran with it. They knew that kids did this some of the time, but they never tried to build a show around that idea. Nickelodeon did some pilot shows before Blue's Clues where kids would be explicitly asked to participate, and lo and behold, there was a lot of evidence that they would. So putting these ideas together, that kids are interested in being intellectually active when they watch TV, and given the opportunity they'll be behaviorally active, that created the philosophy for Blue's Clues."

Steve, as a result, spends almost all his time on screen talking directly at the camera. When he enlists the audience's help, he actually enlists the audience's help. Often, there are close-ups of his face, so it is as if he is almost in the room with his audience. Whenever he asks a question, he pauses. But it's not a normal pause. It's a preschooler's pause, several beats longer than any adult would ever wait for an answer. Eventually an unseen studio audience yells out a response. But the child at home is given the opportunity to shout out an answer of his own. Sometimes Steve will play dumb. He won't be able to find a certain clue that might be obvious to the audience at home and he'll look beseechingly at the camera. The idea is the same: to get the children watching to verbally participate, to become actively involved. If you watch Blue's Clues with a group of children, the success of this strategy is obvious. It's as if they're a group of diehard Yankees fans at a baseball game.

The second thing that Blue's Clues took from SesameStreet was the idea of repetition. This was something that had fascinated the CTW pioneers. In the five pilot shows that Palmer and Lesser took to Philadelphia in 1969, there was a one-minute bit called Wanda the Witch that used the w sound over and over: Wanda the Witch wore a wig in the windy winter in Washington, etc., etc. "We didn't know how much we could repeat elements," Lesser says.