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Book Review: The Art of Scientific Storytelling by Rafael E. Luna, PhD

Chapter 1: Introduction

Skim or skip. This section promotes the book and the promising ideas it conveys, when many of us (me, me, me) just want to get to the meat of the book. After several pages it reads as blah, blah, blah.

Key takeaways: The author, (who is Executive Director of the National Research Mentoring Network), has golden credentials and oodles of experience to share to help you write better.

Chapter 2: Fashioning Your Scientific Story Using the Basic Elements of Narrative Craft

Here’s the content I expected earlier. If you’re already familiar with narrative arcs, this section will feel familiar. If storytelling form is a new concept, then this can help identify the various narrative structures and prepare you to think creatively about how they apply to a research manuscript.

Figure 3 (at right with modifications) helps make the connection without needing to read the entire chapter. The Essential Toolkit of Storytelling Terms is basic, but does teach how to apply these terms directly to the scientific paper you are writing.

Key takeaways: Lifecycle of a Scientific Story begins with the Introduction, Results Section 1, Results Section 2, Results Section 3, Results Climax, Results Validation, and ends with the Discussion.

Chapter 3: An Order of Operations to Streamline Scientific Storytelling

A bit too wordy when telling stories within the larger story. I would prefer to cut to the chase and lay out the steps needed, which does happen by about the fourth page of the chapter, along with some solid general writing guidelines to consider in early drafts.

Key points are summarized in the following excerpt:

“The Introduction ushers your protagonist into a scene with a major problem/scientific unknown, which sets up your hypothesis. Results Sections 1, 2, and 3 show the protagonist undergoing increasing tension by step-wise experimentation to address the major problem/scientific unknown (overall hypothesis), which drives the reaction forward to its highest tension. The Climax experiment is the critical experiment that is centered on the protagonist and provides the strongest evidence for the major findings in the research study, which drives the reaction toward completion. The Validation step lends the most credibility of the study by making a step that makes your story believable. The Discussion section places your results in the context of the current literature, returning your protagonist to his original scene and showing how he is irrevocably changed.”

Key takeaways: The structure of research narrative mirrors other stories, and you can break it down by section. In fact, you should break it down by section and carefully include essential supporting details.

Chapter 4: Specifics for Writing Each Section (Here are the meat and potatoes!)

In the longest (and best) chapter of the book, we get section-by-section guidance on topics like selecting the best title, abstract essentials (sentence by sentence), storytelling through figures, results, introduction, discussion, and finally revision. These steps read a bit like recipes, and offer concrete and clear guidance about what to include.

The author notes:

“If you remember only two things from this book, it should be the following:

1.) A hypothesis can be defined as Conflict Resolution, which is the basis of all stories, especially Scientific Storytelling.

2.) Boldly state your testable hypothesis in your Title and throughout the text of your manuscript provide scientific evidence to substantiate your hypothesis (or in the urban vernacular: Drop the Mic!).”

Included at the end is a quick-start guide to hosting a Scientific Storytelling workshop of 6-18 participants along with critical analysis questions, which can be helpful even outside of the workshop setting and in solo editing.

Key takeaways: Use this section of the guide when crafting your first draft, then refer back to it throughout the revision process. If you mentor, consider if the Scientific Storytelling framework offers a fresh way to bring out more nuances of the flow of scientific writing.

Additional Resources:

• Watch Dr. Luna discuss The Art of Scientific Storytelling in this 1 hour 20 min video.
• “Scientific Storytelling Helps Researchers Communicate Their Findings in a Competitive Publishing Environment,” a review of Dr. Luna’s seminar.
• Writing Well: Lowering the Barriers to Success, an article by James C. Gould, Rafael E. Luna and Donna L. Vogel.
• Available at Amazon.com for $19.95 (as of March 22, 2022).
• Available at AbeBooks.com for $15.89 (as of March 22, 2022).

Helen Sword has made a career of studying how academic writers write.  You may know her from The Writer’s Diet book and online test to tell if your writing is flabby or fit.  Maybe you’ve tried to emulate the elegant expression of ideas surveyed and analyzed in Stylish Academic Writing.  Or perhaps you’ve read her newest book, Air & Light & Time & Space, which describes the many and varied writing practices of successful academic writers (yes, even if you don’t write every day, you can be a successful writer).  If this is your first introduction to her work, check out her catalog for enlightenment.

At the Edge, we think she’s exceptional.  Dr. Sword graciously agreed to a virtual interview about writing in academia:

Your home field is Modernist literature. What brought you into studying and writing about writing?

It all started with The Writer’s Diet.  For years I’d been giving my literature students a handout called “Editing your Prose”; they would accept it politely, take a cursory glance, and shove it to the bottom of their backpacks, never to be seen again.  One day, on a whim, I retitled the handout “The Writer’s Diet” and added some cheesy metaphors about cutting fat from your diet, avoiding the clotted cream of jargon – that sort of thing.  My students loved it; they praised it in their end-of-year evaluations, gave copies to their friends, and started asking me for permission to use it in other contexts such as school teaching and newspaper editing.  That’s when I realized I must be onto something. After publishing my book with that title, I worked with a colleague in Computer Science to program the online WritersDiet Test, which allows you to paste a piece of your writing into a text box, push a button, and get a tongue-in-cheek diagnosis of “flabby” or “fit.”  My Writer’s Diet website (www.writersdiet.com) now attracts more than 70,000 unique visitors per year, so a lot of people seem to find it useful.  And from that point onward I was hooked on writing about academic writing, a field about which there turned out to be very little empirical research.

What did you find most interesting about other academics’ writing habits?

I’ve read a number of how-to-be-a-productive-writer books that contain variations on the same advice: write every day, write at the same time every day, stop worrying or complaining, just write. But when I started interviewing successful writers about their work habits, I discovered that very few of them follow such consistent or virtuous practices.  Some write in the morning, others at night; some write every day, others only in the semester breaks; some “write to think,” others “think to write.”  The amount of variety in their habits fascinated and astonished me.

You’ve criticized “write every day” mantras from the likes of Paul Silvia and Robert Boice.  Do you dislike them because they’re often seen as the only prescription for being an academic writer, when in fact many if not most academics’ writing habits are far more varied, or do you think the advice is actively harmful?

Writing every day is a great practice to try, and I highly recommend it.  But most of the successful academics I interviewed do not write every day; it’s certainly not the only way to be productive. So many writers already carry around a heavy burden of guilt: I’m not fast enough, not talented enough, not skillful enough, not productive enough.  Why add one more stone to the load?  If daily writing works for you, that’s fantastic.  But if it doesn’t, try some other strategies instead.  My new book is full of alternative practices and suggestions, nearly all of which have worked for some writer somewhere.

If you could change one of your own writing habits, which would it be?

I’d love to be able to write more quickly; nearly every sentence or paragraph that I publish takes ages to find its final form, and afterwards I still find myself wishing that I could make just a few more tweaks to the printed version.  But I’ve come to recognize that slow writing and meticulous editing are not “bad habits” that can or should be changed; they’re simply my way of working. Writing this book [Air & Light & Time & Space] taught me not to be so hard on myself: I carve out as much writing time as I can and try not to berate myself if my progress feels slow.  Equally importantIy, I don’t let myself feel guilty or discouraged if my daily writing routine slips for a while.

You found that in writing workshops, the gender ratio is almost invariably 2:1 in favor of women.  We’ve found that many more women than men tend to enroll in our grant pacing (project management) workshops as well.  Why do you think more women than men enroll in these kinds of workshops?

Perhaps female academics are less secure about their writing than their male colleagues?  Or perhaps women are more secure than men about seeking help and development advice?  There’s probably some truth to both these theories; but rather than asking why more women than men enroll in writing workshops, I prefer to shift the question and address the implications of this trend for those of us who support faculty writing.  For example, if some academics (mainly women) are drawn to group environments, while others (mainly men) tend to avoid social learning, what alternative forms of learning might the latter cohort find more appealing and useful than workshops and retreats? (Or are the academics who don’t come to your project management workshops resistant to professional development altogether?)  I’d also be interested in knowing whether the kinds of workshops and learning communities favored by many academic women are undervalued (and therefore underfunded) by the male deans and provosts who hold the majority of senior management roles at universities worldwide.  These are knotty questions that have no easy answers but are certainly worth asking.

From your research, have you found particular writing problems that plague biomedical scientists more than writers from other disciplines?

My research focuses mainly on tracing commonalities rather than identifying disciplinary differences.  Writing is a complex, emotionally fraught task for nearly all academic writers, and no discipline is immune from these challenges.  Having said that, I’ve noted some stylistic issues that frequently crop up in medical journals, and in science writing more generally. The most common is a lack of attention to craft; many scientists, it seems, have never learned how to construct a strong sentence or even how to spot a weak one.  Here’s an example from an article recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association:

The frequency of false-positive cardiac catheterization laboratory activation for suspected STEMI is relatively common in community practice, depending on the definition of false-positive.

We can drill down to the grammatical core of the sentence by identifying its subject, verb, and predicate:

The frequency of false-positive cardiac catheterization laboratory activation for suspected STEMI is relatively common in community practice, depending on the definition of false-positive.

“The frequency is common” makes no sense; it’s a tautological sentence, like saying “the rain is rainy.”  This article – which has nine named authors – presumably went through a robust peer review and copyediting process in order to get published in JAMA; yet not a single person along the way appears to have noticed that this key sentence is rotten at the core.

What’s the biggest difference between writing a paper for submission to a journal and writing a grant?  What should writers of each keep in mind?

Journal articles generally speak to specialized audiences using specialized language; grant applications, on the other hand, must appeal to non-specialists with little tolerance for disciplinary jargon.  A grant application has to be punchy enough to rise to the top of the pile, persuasive enough to convince a group of highly skeptical readers that your project is worth funding.  How do you manage that?  By telling a clear and simple story; by employing concrete language and examples; by keeping your sentences short and sharp.  If you’re used to writing academic articles that do none of these things, you’re unlikely ever to get your ideas past a grant-making committee.

Writers…with a growth mindset never stop seeking out new ways of developing and testing the limits of their craft. – Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space