You rarely see films with a timeline jumping back and forth. The main theme weaves through your narrative like a thread, bringing all the different things you mention together. If you can’t summarise your paper in one simple sentence you might not have a clear motif in mind. These three elements directly apply to scientific papers too. They are based on one main theme, the events are in chronological order, and everything in the story has a purpose. There are three more aspects that successful stories have in common. As in a drama, your reader will be curious about the resolution: What do your findings mean in the context of the literature? How do you explain trend X and Y? How can your results be useful for application Z? What is the big picture? What should be further investigated? Often, I find, the discussion and outlook parts of papers are too short. Eventually you’ll arrive at the climax of your scientific story: the conclusions that you draw from your results.īut that’s not all. Throughout the results section you should gradually solve the problem you started out with. Now you can present your plots, schemes, interpretations i.e. If you’ve covered the main character, setting and tension, the action can start. But don’t fool your readers with general statements, phrase the problem precisely. To introduce the tension, words such as “however”, “despite”, “nevertheless”, “but”, “although” are your best friends. So, tell them what gap in the literature needs to be filled, why method X isn’t good enough to solve Y, or what still isn’t known about mechanism Z. Your readers want to know what problem you are solving here. That sounds like the introduction section of your paper, right? You cite previous work and give the reader a feeling about where the state of the art is.īut – just as with any Hollywood success in the box office – your paper will not become a page-turner, if you don’t introduce an element of tension now. Perhaps a certain disease, reaction mechanism, theory, or historic document? The setting translates to the background that you should provide to your study. The main character in your paper is not Eleven (too bad) but your object of study. Let’s start with the characters and setting. So, how do we utilise these story elements for our paper and write a scientific story? Have a look at the right panel in the figure above and let me explain. We see how things have panned out for our protagonist, how the events of the story have changed her life. Afterwards things get resolved in some way. The action kicks in when she tries to solve the problem, there will be some ups and downs, which will conclude in a big event like a fight or a party. If we glance over to Hollywood, you’ll notice that most dramas follow one simple structure: There is one main character who goes on with her life until she encounters a problem. This can be a conflict, an accident, a problem. His conclusion? The stories that get us curious, excited and emotionally involved have an element of tension. Paul Zak also performed some experiments to find out which stories have the most effect on us. But what is a story? It seems the more people you ask, the more definitions you’ll get. So, humans are wired to love stories, they make us emotional and boost our memory. People in the story group recalled the nouns correctly about six to seven times more often than the other group. One group was instructed to create a narrative with the words, the other to rehearse them one by one. Gordon Bower and Michal Clark from Stanford University in California let two groups of subjects remember random nouns. There’s more to it: Stories also help us remember facts. You could say, stories are a shortcut to our emotions. The hormone affects our mood and social behaviour. He found that once hooked by a story, our brain releases oxytocin. Paul Zak of the Claremont Graduate University in California researches what stories do to our brain. Stories helped us survive, so our brains evolved to love them. The following roughly 94,000 years, we could only use spoken words to communicate. Why are stories so powerful? To answer this, we have to go back at least 100,000 years. Have you binge-watched a TV series recently? Were you ever immersed in a book so that you forgot time? Chances are high that you watch, read, tell and listen to stories every day. If you incorporate the essential story elements, your reader will find your paper easier to read and remember.
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