Telling Science Stories

Reporting, Crafting and Editing for Journalists and Scientists

Martin W. Angler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351035088
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A practical manual for anyone who wants to turn scientific facts into gripping science stories, this book provides an overview of story elements and structure, guidance on where to locate them in scientific papers and a step-by-step guide to applying storytelling techniques to writing about science.

In this book, Martin W. Angler outlines basic storytelling elements to show how and where fledgling science storytellers can find them in scientific output. Journalistic techniques like selection through news values and narrative interviews are covered in dedicated chapters. A variety of writing techniques and approaches are presented as a way of framing science stories in ways that are informative and compelling in different media – from short films to news articles. Practical examples, selected interviews and case studies complement each chapter, with exercises and experimentation suggestions included for deeper understanding. Review questions at the end of each chapter cement the newly gained knowledge to make sure readers absorb it, with links to articles and online tools inviting further reading.

A valuable resource for students of journalism and science communication as well as professional journalists, scientists and scientists-in-training who want to engage with the public or simply improve their journal papers. This book is a one-stop shop on science storytelling with a clear focus on providing practical techniques and advice on how to thrive as science writers and communicate science in all of its complexity.

1 Introduction

What you will learn in this chapter:

• Does science need story?
• Your brain on story
• The power of three
• Scientist or storyteller?
• Storytelling in scientific writing
• Ethical considerations
• Case study: A science story

These are the heydays of science journalism. People love to read about new discoveries, profiles of famous scientists and researchers who go on lifelong quests to save the world from terrible diseases. Science stories have made it to the front pages of the New York Times and the likes (alright, not every day, but at least sometimes). Science is hugely popular in the media, and there is a reason for that: the powerful combination of narratives and hard scientific facts. In school lessons, kids allegedly struggle to focus for more than a quarter of an hour. Attention spans are highly debated. Some claim they are as low as seven (goldfish-ish) and twelve seconds. But then again, have you seen anyone with trouble focusing in the movie theatre? Or reading a book? Quite the contrary. Binge-watching is on the rise among college students (Panda & Pandey 2017). Everybody loves stories. We’re wired to love stories. We learn through stories. Our society passes on knowledge through stories. We experience catharsis through stories. We connect with strangers through stories. Because stories are inherently persuasive, they are so powerful. Facts and figures? Less so. But that doesn’t mean that storytelling and science are mutually exclusive. And it doesn’t mean science is boring and story is not. In fact, it turns out that combining the two is a powerful combination. This is the best weapon we have in the fight against fake news these days. Fake news are stories without facts. Facts without story are boring. What we need is science stories that combine both and we will win.

So, welcome to this book on science and story! I have one goal and one goal only. To bring together the seemingly contrasting worlds of science and story. Throughout this book, we’ll have a look at how you can apply various fiction writing techniques to tell science stories that stick. Some of them have already been used to tell science stories for lay audiences, some have been used in scientific manuscripts. And others are purely experimental. Before we dig into the craft of science stories, let’s have a look at why the techniques work. You, I and everybody else are story junkies, like it or not. They just work. And when we consume stories, we absorb new information, combine it with our existing knowledge and blend them together into a new state of knowledge. That’s how we learn. That’s how science works, too. So here’s already our first overlap between science and real life. So let’s look at what makes us tick and how our brains process stories. That is why one of the first sections covers the brain science aspects, where I’m trying to give you a few biological and psychological reasons for why we crave stories.

Journalists have long discovered the potential of wrapping dry facts into stories using literary techniques. They deliver fact-checked true stories to their audience that read like pieces of fiction. The movement started in the 1950s (most prominently Rodolfo Walsh, who is also considered the founder of investigative journalism), took off in the 1960s (Truman Capote with “In Cold Blood”) and was redefined in the 1970s, where Tom Wolfe wrote his seminal manifest “The New Journalism”. That’s a long time, and creative nonfiction, as narrative journalism is often called, has undergone several evolutionary steps. Also, it has always faced criticism. Some of this criticism is about ethics. Well-told stories are incredibly persuasive. Politicians use them to push their agendas, marketers use them to make us buy their products and yes, even scientists and journalists misuse them to make their points. The most important external driving factor is money. Thus, I’ve decided to dedicate one section of this chapter to address the ethics of narratives.

This chapter also contains two sections dedicated to the seemingly everlasting fight between scientists who refuse the application of storytelling techniques and storytellers who claim scientists can’t get their science across. Both camps are right in some ways, but they can be reconciled. You’ll find a section that addresses the criticism against storytelling in journalism, and it will also expand on a few specific debates on science storytelling. Does science need story? You bet. We’ll rebut much of the criticism by pointing out the many misconceptions of using narrative techniques in science. To be clear, not only do we need science writers who can employ literary techniques, we also need an increasing number of scientists that can convey their science to a large audience. That’s why initiatives like Story Collider (I’ve included a lovely conversation about it in the chapter on screenwriting) are so important, because they get the scientists out of the labs and onto the stage. Actually, theatrical techniques in conveying science is a thing. A big thing. Dissemination of scientific results is part of the scientific method. But why should it stop at submitting scientific papers? That’s one-way communication, and that’s not how the real world works. Studies show that dialogue is how we assimilate knowledge. Science journalists do a great job at making science accessible, but the general public still finds a lot of scientific advances fishy, to say the least. It just lacks trust. More than ever, scientists appear to inhabit their ivory towers and talk condescendingly to the rest of the world. And I do get the public. I’ve worked with many scientists over the years. Most were fun to work with and curious to experiment with language and story. But some are not, no offense. The only thing they are interested in is their academic profile. The way things run now, that means a high impact factor (wrong) and a high h-index. It just makes it easier to compare your… achievements. If you are a scientist reading this book, you might find some of the techniques shown in this book are not only for the popular divulgation of your work but also for improving your papers. This, in turn, adds the benefit that the journalists out there will have a much easier time grasping your paper’s gist and limitations and hence make fewer mistakes when writing about your work.

Woah, this sounds like a bit of a heavy introduction, but it really isn’t. We’ll also have a bit of fun looking at the rule of threes, one of the fundamental rules in fiction and nonfiction persuasive writing. The structures of some literary masterpieces are built in threes, jokes are delivered in threes and marketers like Apple Inc. praise their products in triplets. The sentence you just read came in threes. Once we’re done with the threes, we’ll examine an award-winning, masterfully written Nautilus science piece, “The Man Who Tried to Redeem The World”, which portraits a science protagonist on his journey through personal and professional woes. It’s a tragedy. You all know what a tragedy looks and feels like. You all know what a good story is once it’s in front of you. Call it gut feeling or innate knowledge or story genetics. Story is best learnt through looking at some practical examples, that’s why Amanda Gefter shares with us the elements she focused on when writing her tragic story on Walter Pitts. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of these elements. Just absorb them and enjoy the story. In the next chapter, we’ll have a closer look at story elements, and throughout the book, we’ll zero in on the different storytelling elements and techniques. Once you’ve read through it, you’ll be able to apply the techniques to tell stories about science. These techniques will also help you to omit whatever is irrelevant. Let’s go!

Does science need story?

Yes it does. First, it needs stories as a research tool. Narratives play a role as a qualitative research methodology, for example in the social sciences. Narratives also play a role in medicine, where both medical staff and patients tell their stories. Rita Charon, who is both an internist and a literary scholar, runs a narrative medicine division at Columbia University. Later in this book, we’ll take another look at Charon’s efforts. Psychology uses narratives (both as a research method and as a form of therapy). Education analyses narratives and employs them to understand how children and adolescents learn. In higher education, researchers use PhD students’ narratives to determine why some of them drop out of their programmes. During the interviews, they ask the students to list the high and low points on their journeys. On top of that, students also drew their journeys, and the researchers also analysed academic narratives (McAlpine 2016).

We’ll see a number of other ways science can profit from storytelling methods. For example, writing papers (or at least abstracts) using narrative techniques should become a no-brainer whenever possible. Not all studies and disciplines equally lend themselves to storytelling. But when you apply those techniques (like identifying a character, plot points, scene-setting, using dialogue and many more of the elements you’ll see in the next chapter), your study would definitely improve. Stories make it easy to pick up new information and integrate it with what you already know. It’s a natural way to learn and stay focused. So why not use that? Arguments against using storytelling techniques often include that scientific papers are primarily written for scientific peers. That’s both true and false. First argument: they’re written for scientific peers. But peers are also humans, with the same brain structures and functions. Why not rivet their attention a little longer? Although peers may be from the same discipline, they perhaps specialise in different areas of expertise. Second, it’s not just peers who read scientific publications. Think about science journalists who read the papers. Think about how often they misreport facts and, for example, imply causality when there is merely a correlation that emerges from the data analysis. Like everything (and especially story), science is subject to change. Why should scientific publishing be an exception? The current format (IMRAD) has its merits, but it’s not a block of marble. In fact, scientific publishing is only 350 years old, and quality-assuring (at least in an ideal world) concepts like peer review are even younger. So dare to use narratives in scientific publishing if your material lends itself to storytelling. Indeed, science and story influence each other mutually, as literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall writes in his book “The Storytelling Animal”. He points out an important aspect:

Science, I argue, can help us make sense of storytelling. But some say that science is a grand story (albeit with hypothesis testing) that emerges from our need to make sense of the world. The storylike character of science is most obvious when it deals with origins: of the universe, of life, of storytelling itself.

(Gottschall 2012:49)

Stories help us make sense of the world. As you’ll see throughout this book, this sounds true in many ways. If you’ve ever wandered through a cemetery, how many epitaphs have you encountered that contain some sort of variation of “why”? Death often seems random and strikes us out of the blue. But us humans, we can’t deal well with random events, we need to make sense of them. We need to put them in order. We need to find reasons. That is why cause and effect structures are one of the most powerful tools in storytelling. Studies show that we can’t just observe two separate events happen one after another and think they are independent. We just naturally infer they are related.

This includes journalism. Not just science journalism but any kind of journalism can benefit from applying storytelling methods, and be it only specific story elements (as opposed to always writing full stories that contain all storytelling elements – that’s usually not necessary to turn dry journalism into compelling reads). Investigative journalist Mark Lee Hunter writes that in regular, fast-paced news journalism, dramatic structure is not happening, and it doesn’t have to. News is continuous, so it doesn’t need an end. But in investigative journalism, the impact of the story depends directly on the dramatic structure you choose for your story. It is you, the reporter, who offers the story’s conclusion.

The problem with science is that it is intrinsically boring. Wait, that came out wrong. Let me rephrase. Science in itself is not boring. The way it is being communicated is most often boring. It is either too specific – think jargon-packed five-liners as headlines aka journal paper titles; or it is too vague – think impalpable abstract words. How many people of the general public read journal papers? Not many. Probably nobody. Even science journalists repeatedly fail to read the papers in their entirety and just try to extract the elements they are specifically looking for in order to craft their stories. Whatever we read about science, it’s pre-selected, filtered and hence biased. In more general terms, internet activist Eli Pariser called this effect the “filter bubble”. Information is tailored to our demographic profile and to the interests we implicitly or explicitly declare on online platform. But in contrast to the scientific communication provided by many scientists, 30-second-long online videos (or a couple of minutes, at most) take off and go viral. Why is that? Because they tell a story. Have a look at one of the videos National Geographic or BBC Earth post on Facebook regularly. That’s the stuff people share and tell their friends about. Because they’re stories. So yes, science can use storytelling techniques and still remain accurate. And no, it cannot afford to just communicate the bare figures if it wants to engage the general public.

Sara ElShafie, a biologist and PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, has done something remarkable: she contacted Pixar Animation Studios and teamed up with a few of their collaborators to find out how scientists can use the animators’ storytelling techniques to convey their research. In order to make people care about science, it must achieve meaningfulness, which is best done through storytelling (ElShafie 2018). Storytelling also involves emotions, and if the audience remains emotionless, it won’t care. So that’s probably the main issue with science communication: everybody tries to be objective, but that objectivity is boring. Objectivity is emotionless. Objectivity doesn’t take sides. In contrast, story does take a side. Story evokes emotions. Story is personal and accessible. Most importantly, story adds meaning through theme, that’s the universal truth of each story that connects the audience members among each other. And it makes the audience connect with the story. In contrast to the Carl Sagan accusations, academics who engage in public outreach are often more productive than others. Successful public outreach paves the way for funding, broader public acceptance (which, don’t forget that, provides the foundation for science-friendly politics as well as the taxpayers’ money needed to actually conduct research):

Scientists who communicate effectively with the public can promote broader support for the sciences, encourage greater funding of research, increase the influence of science on public policy, and inspire tomorrow’s scholars to join the scientific ranks. For these and many other reasons, one could argue that it is in the interest of all scientists that they and their colleagues engage in “outreach” to promote broader science literacy and knowledge.

(Blanton & Ikizer 2019:155)

In an op-ed for The Guardian, linguistics Professor Nick Enfield points out that scientists are also human beings and thus subject to the same physiological and psychological restrictions and abilities as everybody else: “Bugs in our reasoning from the confirmation bias to the gambler’s fallacy make our natural thought processes deeply subjective and partial” (Enfield 2018). He also claims that even if a fully objective scientist existed, she would still have to deal with an audience who is not. Instead, that audience expects stories. Story adds meaning. But without interpretation, the bare facts are meaningless. This is what people often ask when facts are just presented as list: So what? What do you want to tell me? And that is what storytelling is: to add meaning (Enfield 2018). He finds clear words for whether storytelling and science go together or not:

It is our responsibility to become at least literate, if not masterly, in storytelling about our work. Our audiences need stories. So we must tell the right stories about our findings, if we are going to treat those findings with th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Story Elements
• 3. Discovering Science Stories
• 4. Narrative Structure
• 5. Story Formulas
• 6. Language and Style
• 7. Screenwriting Techniques
• 8. Literary Techniques
• 9. Writing and Revising
• The Scientific Method
• Index