Tell a Story Posted on December 4, 2007 Empirical reports need to tell a story, says Jay Belsky (bio).

When it comes to writing, I would give some further advice, especially empirical reports. They have to have a story. They have to tell a story. There’s got to be a narrative there. In fact, I don’t write until I have my tables set up in a sequence that I can tell a story. In fact when I’m doing analysis, and I’m getting data tabled I’m always thinking, what is the narrative, and I’m reshuffling the tables and trying to think, what is the story I’m telling here.

Then after I’ve got my tables, the first thing I do is I write up the results, because that’s fairly descriptive and easy, once you have the tables. The trick is not just writing statistically, but writing conceptually, and making it clear why you’re running this analysis, what the question is, and that kind of thing. From there I go and write out the methods, because that’s kind of easy to do, too. Now I’ve already got a half paper done. So it’s not quite downhill, but I’m well up the hill.

I also know now where my introduction has to lead up to, because ultimately there should be a semi-parallel structure between the ideas developed in the introduction and the analysis and the result reporting in the results section. So if I know what my results are now I can tell my story in the introduction - an answer that sets the stage for the work and fundamentally answers the question which all research has to answer, which is why bother? Why bother caring about this? Why bother doing this work?

Even then, it’s writing and rewriting and always asking yourself this simple question: “Why does this sentence, paragraph, subsection, or section come after the one that came before it and come before the one that comes next?” If you can’t answer that question clearly, then the writing needs more work. The metaphor I often use is that a beautiful necklace is more than a set of beads. It’s a set of beads aesthetically strung together. So the art of writing is aesthetically stringing together a series of ideas and keeping that in mind and taking it in a modular manner step by step and keeping at it is a good way to develop your skills as a writer.

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