From the UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
What makes influential science? Telling a good story
In a study published Dec. 15 in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers from the University of Washington looked at the abstracts from more than 700 scientific papers about climate change to find out what makes a paper influential in its field. But instead of focusing on content, they looked at writing style, which is normally more the province of humanities professors rather than scientists.
Their idea was that papers written in a more narrative style — those that tell a story — might be more influential than those with a drier, more expository style. Psychology and literary theory have long held that if you want someone to remember something, you should communicate it in the form of a story. The UW researchers — led by Annie Hillier, a recent graduate from the UW’s School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, and professors Ryan Kelly and Terrie Klinger — wondered whether this theory would hold up in the realm of peer-reviewed scientific literature.
Remarkably, it did. The most highly cited papers tended to include elements like sensory language, a greater degree of language indicating cause-and-effect and a direct appeal to the reader for a particular follow-up action.
“The results were especially surprising given that we often think of scientific influence as being driven by science itself, rather than the form in which it is presented,” Hillier said.
Perhaps even more surprising, the researchers noted, was the finding that the highest-rated journals tended to feature articles that had more narrative content.
“We don’t know if the really top journals pick the most readable articles, and that’s why those articles are more influential, or if the more narrative papers would be influential no matter what journal they are in,” Kelly said.
The researchers used a crowdsourcing website to evaluate the narrative content of the journal articles. Online contributors were asked a series of questions about each abstract to measure whether papers had a narrative style, including elements like language that appeals to one’s senses and emotions.
The researchers hope this work might lead to advances in scientific communication, improving the odds that science might lead the way to better decisions in the policy realm.
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Sometimes pictures are effective in communicating science. For example, the following depicts Newton’s third law of motion:
https://gm1.ggpht.com/yV7xnGuDIjm9Nngv6iSfTjdoTt8tW2froDMZzkgm9I1CCtCmbVh70HnwE1tuoPHMycYFem3G1CjwKSZEBuJcStU6t47l_zJK4WsvBmTJqtbMFjOHe4LeH9PLal2xyruLmSIbIm-AZlNC3ucQcFFvajcKzu8tYxgH8PcJV0ChCpBVywIfg7wJwUsdgaEb57LrvcbTMUUkKy_zg5SQPyaRX_bfBaUK_3tMzNQUQCpTtMS_97Lb4XxUqYLjSPxdrZNBeEop1RZUJFzuEo2nq2sCcPawNED5NgoTJ2A4PJrasXeXfH8sJgFQgF34rPtvVrhanzv4OsYGPLRMy5Zl05B9uYnSQfwvo6Fq5yVmE6JXQi-RoNsFYD0QmZFO8r-T5SOHE6xAWrf4rF9UCRr_9BhxofvKnuNQh0g0YbvYXSQe0NvWjNrXox2_Ck6IaUAGyByXzVP53EnEPgb8Rl5crVm3VpL8h8gpyzWwdI7G8casNRVwYuPf_uc5SgIQLCnrfa01dTYfeeAN3jbdKO1iBsXXnAXSToVxO77LqN6VLHxi16kQYXMApxYxCfZSOjLb_VTusSoMGyW86P5HXvKB8Bl4cIaiJuIfL6vKgD1QJ9aBtvAW47PKKNW1b2NEvigE7khb5QQioeKFzT8gqnTqKa904r8sYKofFL6byYi6zNk5cPVR8AMvXmmP5wk6kI49bK6BIELKMTXhjMW9XA=s0-l75-ft-l75-ft
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Forbidden That’s all we know.
Bruce Cobb ==> Technical hint: Use http://tinyurl.com/ to turn that huge URL into something, well tiny, like http://tinyurl.com/go5kxjj, then use the “Open in New WIndow” link to test it before posting — unfortunately, as Johannes Herbst points out, it returns a 403.
There are only three choices in science. It is true, not true, or you do not know. For the engineer, the hard part is dealing with what we do not know. I maintain that technical documents should be written at a level that a high school graduate would be able to get general understanding.
The Final Safety Analysis Report is a document that is submitted to the NRC for a license to operate a reactor and is also available to the public for comments. The NRC then asks for additional information. Part of my job was to answer these question.
One NRC request appeared to be a case of an inexperience NRC reviewer (aka a stupid question). When I read that section of the FSAR I was totally confused. Say What? It was a perfect example of a technical expert providing true statement without putting them in the bigger picture. I added a narrative telling the reader what we were going them and why. Then I placed the true statements in a logical order based on plant operation and general design criteria (GDC).
The technical content was not changed. It was just easier to understand.
Note the success of the warmistas in their language. It’s all about “carbon pollution”, dirty carbon.
Search Google for carbon pollution, and up pops an ad from the Sierra Club: “Carbon pollution is the main contributor to climate disruption, making extreme weather worse — including more severe floods, widespread wildfires and record drought. It is also linked to life-threatening air pollution—such as the smog that can trigger asthma attacks.”
Why do we allow our political leaders and the commentariat to refer to carbon dioxide as a pollutant instead of a greenhouse gas? In a process called “photosynthesis,” plants use the energy in sunlight to convert CO2 and water to sugar and oxygen. The plants use the sugar for food — food that we use, too, when we eat plants or animals that have eaten plants — and they release the oxygen into the atmosphere.
Yes, atmospheric carbon dioxide and H20 are the two basic molecules for all life on Earth. Also, look at atmospheric evolution via biology over geological time. In a billion years, the original primordial atmosphere has been fully replaced by a gas mix that is entirely of biological origin (except Argon).
Plants have been evolving leaf structures that are better at removing CO2 from the atmosphere. The reason for evolving is due to tens of millions of years of declining CO2 concentrations. The rise of C4 grasses was because the older C3 plants were starving. It was survival of the fittest. Soil biology and bacteria are part of the biogeochemical nitrogen cycle, which interacts with the other biogeochemical cycles and the abiotic physics of oceans. It’s ironic that advocates think that CO2 is bad for the “environment”, when the opposite is true. More CO2 is good for all life on Earth.
Nitrogen had a biological origin? UV didn’t hydrolize water? Methane didn’t seep and form clathrates…and get into the atmosphere?
Your first sentence is entirely correct. Might be good to leave it at that.
We have a chicken-and-the-egg problem by taking it much further. If plants need CO2 to grow and produce oxygen, where did the CO2 come from, if there was no previous presence of oxygen?
So that explains the year or more of silence that followed the Miracle Year of Einstein publications. He just didn’t spin a tale with them.
The flipside of this is that mathematics-rich writing is an obstacle, even to many physicists who are well versed in mathematics.
You’ve just got to keep it simple for the kiddies-
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/teachers-preaching-politics-at-captive-students/news-story/b406653b99a76ce8e984cefe9c15b898
when you’re not exploding them of course.
Robber,
It’s perfectly acceptable to eat the by products of carbon dioxide “pollution” (i.e., plant foods). We just cannot allow too much of it to infect our climate. We cannot allow the plants to take in too much of it, even though we are most entitled to eat the plants that depend on it, whose uptake of it we positively MUST dictate — good nourishment for our anthropogenic-centric sense of control.
Bottom line: good nutrition entails eating a wide variety of CO2-pollution by products. Our physical bodies are carbon-pollution based, remember. Good Earth stewardship entails converting CO2 to BS.
If you tell a lie often enough ….
Part of any good narrative, is talking about how many are killed by whatever. I know a good lie when a see one.
Part of my job is fact checking. If the NRC catches a fact that is not supported by the reference will result in a root cause investigation, a mistake will get you training, a big fat lie will get you jail time. The word ‘not’ was added to my document. This confused the NRC since I did such a good job of explaining the positive. This why I keep copies of legal documents I sign.
When talking about pollution from coal power plants, scientific papers should have a number specifying the number killed. If you dig deep enough you find some research by bold faced liars at Harvard. They have a theory about PM2.5. By killed they mean the a small shortened life span of very old critically ill person who is in already in a hospital bed.
Harvard did not show expose or that the pollution came from a coal.
Federal regulations that I have seen do not make exception for federal employees. Treat the EPA like the people they prosecute, may be a good way to fire the liars.
Sometimes you need to fess up to the limits of human hubris with your narratives-
http://www.wattclarity.com.au/2016/12/forecasting-is-a-mugs-game/
and admit to yourself you’re indulging in the genre of the fairy story.
Fantasy ?
(wait for it)
Once upon a time, there was a wicked troll called Gorrum. He hated fun and he hated candy. Most of all, he hated children.
“How can I make those children as miserable as I can?” he said to his troll sister, Whiskers O’Naymy.
“Take away their toys. And make their parents work for us, so they can’t make any more,” she rasped.
“Hm… how to do it,” he muttered.
“Tell them a charming story. Children love stories.”
“But, they will never believe me, they don’t trust me anymore,” his eyes narrowed as he cracked his knuckles and scratched his head.
“Tell them the priests said it was so.”
So, Gorrum, being very rich, hired bad gnomes (the ones with the moldy brown hats) to walk up and down the land, telling this story as movingly as they could, with a ghastly-but-apparently-in-earnest pained expression on their faces, over and over and over and over, so that no one could think of anything else:
Hearken to my tragic tale, sweet children! A few years ago, high up in the sky, a powerful little royal molecule, Carbonne d’ Ochseid II, winked at a Rain Fairy. She smiled. They joined hands and together drifted slowly down, coming to rest on the North Pole. “Marry me,” said Carbonne to the lovely fairy. She said with melting eyes, “I will marry you.” They were married by Santa Claus. Soon, children arrived, borne to their castle door by a stork called Arrhenius. And all was sweetness and light until….
Until their children became exceedingly numerous. You see, Rain Fairies were never, ever meant to marry the d’ Ochseids. We must excuse them, dear children, for they were in love, so, they were not thinking straight. Well, as it happens, Rain Fairies only do good to the Arctic, bringing snow and warmth in turn, from the sky and from the sea. And the d’ Ochseids do almost nothing in the Arctic, but, are very good at raising plants. For millenia it has been so. They have always lived in peace and harmony.
But their children, oh, dear. I am afraid I have something quite frightening to tell you — their children are: MONSTERS. Yes! Oh, they look like ordinary Rain Fairies (the mother’s phenotype always prevails with Rain Fairies), but they are not! No, not at all. They have terrible powers. They can melt ice just by staring at it. They can turn the atmosphere into smoke. They can make the earth’s core heat up to MILLIONS of degrees (centigrade). SANTA IS IN GRAVE DANGER. If something is not done, and soon, ten years at the most, well, maybe 30 or 50, or maybe 100, but SOON, they will destroy the planet!! Yes. It is a planetary emergency. Already, the glaciers in Greenland have receded to reveal ancient villages. Soon, THERE WILL BE NO ICE AT ALL AND THE PLANET WILL TIP — OVER (if it does not flood first)!!
The only answer is, oh, I am so sorry to have to tell you this, but, the only solution is to exterminate a good part of the baby d’Ochseids. Yes. It is that serious. So, Santa will. Yes, boys and girls, Santa will save the day. It will be hard on him, but, he will do what he has never done before, he has found a SOLUTION to the Carbonne d’ Ochseid problem: he will TAKE your toys AND YOUR ELECTRICITY. And replace them with: straw and a small goat. And some soy beans.
And the gnomes’ story upset the children of the land greatly. “Oh, what will we do?” wailed the children. “How will we keep warm in the winter?”
“Build windmills,” the gnomes called as they started running down the road out of town (some of the adults were looking menacing).
“Out of what?” whispered the children, “we can’t make steel without a lot of electricity… .”
“Out of ……….. ” was all they heard as the last mud-colored gnome cap disappeared into the night.
Oh, dear. What will happen next?
The story has a happy ending!
Just as the children lay down to cry themselves to sleep on their bamboo mats, the golden sound of church bells ringing was heard. Everyone ran into the public square where the town crier stood on the balcony of city hall and joyfully proclaimed: “Gorrum’s henchmen’s story was all a big lie! Truth has prevailed. We’re saved! Trump won!”
And they lived happily ever after.
#(:))
Janice Moore December 16, 2016 at 4:36 pm
Shame on you Janice! You completely plagiarized that piece. I recently read that on the front page of the NYT. Just because you changed the ending doesn’t inviolate the rule!!! #sarc
Brilliant actually.
sssshhh! Don’t tell anyone, okay? Ya do what ya gotta do. 😉
And, thank you!!
I object. I’ve got mouldy brown hats – sure I frequently declare children are monsters, but I never tell anyone to build windmills. That would be truly evil.
lol, gnome. 🙂 I thought you were the little red cap-wearing type. Well, in the muddy hat clan, you are an anomaly! (in the normal sense of that word, heh)
A while ago in a conversation with a group when this sort of thing came up I was reminded that when I was a child, telling a story involved some sort of fabrication. While apparently not uniform, this was well before the days of political correctness and loose creative language. Whether it is a form of Freudian tribal memory slip or not it is verified in the dictionary definitions. It is a narrative which may or may not be true, other definitions similar, until number 9, a lie. Maybe the proper academic response should simply be–“THERE YOU GO, TELLING A STORY AGAIN.”
I guess they weren’t able to assess whether real bonefied scientific research itself inspired better writing or not. When you know you’ve searched through a toolkit of statistical tools to find one that supports your foregone conclusions and you’ve enhanced it by throwing out samples that don’t fit the curve or you’ve greatly overweighted the result from one tree that best suits your ‘finding’ , or you’ve found that plotting one proxy’s results upside down gives a good fit, or selecting a disturbed or compromised sample does the trick, or horrors of horrors you truncate the resulting plot to rid it of an unwanted decline…
Even when writing literary fiction (or especially when you are writing fiction of any kind!) forcing the plot, fuzzy logic, overselling the storyline, protesting too much, overreaching… actually produces uncompelling, so-what prose.
Like all these artsy fartsy social science investigations of science, the first assumption they make: that the science itself is legitimate, is wrong. If a study has compelling, verifiable results that support the theory it WILL BE readable and won’t need creative writing artifacts. It is precisely the stuff that requires convolutions of arguments, extensive verbal bondo and dodgy statistics- especially custom made stuff by excel challenged practitioners.
Oops the ending :that turns a reader off.
As with climate science and so many other things in life, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”. Hmmm. I’m thinking this could be the book title for the history of modern climate science.
by R. G. B. (of Oz)
Nice idea!
Thanks Janice. You want to co-write? Gonna be a long book!
For “Good”, please read “Lucrative”.
RGB: You’re welcome. And, no, I can see that your fine creativity will be more than adequate to complete the job (and I’m just not much of a group project kind of person, unless it is the most efficient way to achieve a goal). I’d be happy to edit/proofread/offer style suggestions, though.
David Friedman is not one to be persuaded by junk science, no matter how it’s dressed up.
As the new ambassador to Israel, Friedman joins a growing list of smart climate sceptics on Trump’s team.
http://www.doctordavidfriedman.com/global-warming-hoax-of-the-century-put-on-ice/
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/02/david_friedman_14.html
Am I right in concluding that Tillerson, Secretary of State nominee, is the only alarmist on Trump’s list? He faces a bumpy ride through the approval process, however.
To communicate “science” we have, basically, just numbers and words. There are “rules and proofs” that show that 2+2=4. If you say or “prove” otherwise, you’d have to fiddle with the the numbers, the rules or the proofs.
The “words” part? There are rules of language for grammar, definitions of the words used, to some extent, even for ‘figures of speech”.
Used honestly they can combine to communicate or teach a concept. Even if the concept is in error, it is an “honest mistake”. No attempt to deceive.
What the human brings into it is “honesty”.
Is the Mann humble enough to admit he might be wrong?
Is the Mann so prideful to believe he can’t be wrong?
Or is one so greedy for power (to use for whatever end) or cash that he doesn’t care as long as they keep coming?
That last is the womb from which propaganda is born.
People can be ignorant, or stupid, or blinded by ideology but, worst of all, they can be intentionally deceitful.
GD,
You forgot spelling.
Flows for floes.
Here here for Hear hear.
Bonefied for bona fide.
It’s for its on many occasions.
Do we understand that poor spelling destroys credibility faster than light?
Geoff
Story telling may not be the proper medium for writing about the “true science” of AGW, but if you need propaganda then by all means tell a compelling story and better yet use celebrities.
Classic example in recent history that had an impact with the general population of a degree that CAGW took over the medium and its so-called “truth”, look no further than the, umm, Playboy centerfold Jenny McCarthy’s lament about autism due to vaccines. In that regard, this “study” from UW is spot on. Tell a good story with an even better face (celebrity) and BINGO; you have persuaded (indoctrinated) a huge segment of the population based on no factual evidence, just a great story.
A great example of “story telling” about the science of Climate Change, look no further than Ian Plimer’s book “Heaven & Earth”. Some here may argue with his postulations, but for me his book was persuasive about the “science first” while the story telling kept it interesting enough for the layman to stay interested, in a very important topic. Not sure if his book was widely read, or for that matter even read by this audience.
“The Origin of Species” was written in an extraordinarily engaging, readable manner, giving one the impression of a grand intellect digesting an incredible amount of empirical data, but in a story form. It sold. So did “The Principia Mathematica,” one of the most densely packed, arcane works of the human mind. It took me a year to read the first 19 pages of The Principia, and I realized at the end that those pages contained the equivalent of the first two years of education in engineering mechanics. Yet Newton caught on nearly as rapidly as Darwin. I wonder if it is we who have changed.
Chapter one: Once upon a time there was cold . . . and then there was hot. This ruined a lot of stuff… (to be continued).
{stuff}… . It was nobody’s fault. It just was. The End. 🙂
They did not even bother to read those papers. Another “research” based on reading abstracts. I wonder if they got a 97% consensus; Anthony does not give us a link (a valuable work may well be guarded behind a paywall) nor a single number.
There are many books and many stories that lead many peoples to conflict. A story is, in effect, a lie, especially *OLD* stories.
I wrote my dissertation in narrative style, all 159 pages, and my defense committee loved it.
I wrote journal peer-reviewed manuscripts in 5000 word limited “just the facts” style to meet word limit journal requirements.
Different animals. Different disciplines and journals have wildly different criteria on length that then determines weiting style.
Duh!
I have used a narrative style in technical reports on occasion, when it served to convey where data from a series of experiments led us …… their results, and the conclusions we could draw from them.
However, the use of “sensory language, a greater degree of language indicating cause-and-effect and a direct appeal to the reader for a particular follow-up action” smacks of advocacy and personally biased activism, not dispassionate science.
Language doesn’t indicate cause and effect. Replicable experiments that demonstrate ‘If A is present, then B reacts’ indicate cause and effect. Replicable experiments are the standard of the scientific method… and appeal to the analytical mind.
Replicable experiments, correlation, confidence intervals, yadda yadda yadda – They bore the hell out of the ADD afflicted, emotional mind. Sensory language (I think, I feel..), firm statements of cause and effect (CO2 causes global warming….), and appeals to action (You must act to save the planet…) are what the emotional mind responds to.
When you know you are communicating with an emotional mind, use their familiar communications techniques to express your science knowledge in a way they can comprehend.
Example:
“You might remember that CO2 is essential food for plants from your high school science class. Plants feel better and grow faster with more CO2 in the atmosphere. When naturally organic plants have more CO2 food available, they grow faster using less nonrenewable energy, fertilizers, and water, enhancing locally grown, sustainable food sourcing. You really don’t want to continue starving the plants do you? Please support a greener planet by liberating more CO2 food for the plants to feed on!”
I would love to see the experimental section of that paper.
What kind of narrometer did they use?
What is the sensibility, accuracy and precision of the tecnique?
Has the narrometer been calibrated?
What book has been used to calibrate the narrometer, a British one or an american one?
Defining the stylistic difference between study and science..
“The researchers hope this work might lead to advances in scientific communication, improving the odds that science might lead the way to better decisions in the policy realm.”
A sensationalists’ charter… Better decisions in the policy realm will come from better science, not better-communicated science.
“Story telling…hard-wired into DNA”
Would that be the Twinky gene sequence?
There are some numbers at
http://motls.blogspot.com/2016/12/study-hollywood-like-dramatic-style-not.html?m=1
To summarize: Q. How to communicate science? A. Alarmism sells.
What if the science is not alarming? Then it wouldn’t be science if you used alarmism, right?
Polio was an alarm-worthy problem before genuine science found an answer.
CAGW is warped science promoting a problem to which only political science is the answer.