If the work is good why does it need a story?

I thought we do science here, not fiction or romance

I recently wrote about how to present research or other technical work by telling a story. This is a topic dear to my heart. I teach this material in my undergraduate and graduate classes, and I have given countless presentations on the topic. So I’m quite familiar with common pushback. It usually runs along two themes: (i) We’re doing research. It has nothing to do with emotions. Why do you go on and on about eliciting emotional responses?¹ (ii) Storytelling is just about manipulating the audience, convincing them of something that isn’t true, or otherwise misleading them about the facts. Real scientists don’t tell stories, they report the truth.²

Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash

I believe both of these responses are misguided. But also, they highlight how important it is to cover this material in detail. The average student in math, computer science, physics, biology, or engineering is never going to learn about storytelling, and yet we expect them to give presentations that somehow do not put the audience to sleep. I care deeply about this topic because I’ve sat through too many boring presentations. And it’s particularly frustrating when the presenter has good material in principle but just totally messes up the presentation. That’s why I keep writing about this topic. If only one person gives better presentations after reading one of my posts I have had a positive impact in the world.

Emotions

Let’s start with emotions. Why should you care about the emotional state of your audience? You’re talking about facts, logic, observations. None of this has anything to do with emotions. So it’s not something you have to think about, right?

This is one of the most common misconceptions by people working in technical fields. In fact, even if they’re not consciously aware of it, technical people routinely take actions based on their emotions. And then they employ logic to justify retroactively why they did what they did. Let me provide an example where emotions unexpectedly crop up. If you’re a scientist, you’ve probably had a grant proposal rejected. If so, I bet the rejection contained the following sentence: “There was low enthusiasm because of X, Y, and Z.”³ This is a statement about an emotion. Enthusiasm is an emotion.⁴ I don’t know about you, but I want enthusiasm in my audience. I want them to jump out of their seats and scream “Yes, YES, this, more of this!”⁵ And to get this reaction, just logic and facts won’t cut it. We have to reach deeper.

As another example, let’s assume you’re giving a presentation. Your audience will always feel some emotions, regardless of what you say or do.⁶ To start out, they will bring some emotional baseline into the room. Maybe they are happy because earlier in the day they experienced a major success. Or they are sad or anxious because a loved one has fallen ill. Or they are bored because their job isn’t meaningful to them and they feel they’re just sitting around wasting their time. Whatever their baseline, it will influence how they perceive your talk. So you have two options: You can either try to control their emotional state and guide them to a point where you would like them to be, or you can leave it up to them to experience whatever they feel in response to what you’re saying. To me, the second option is equivalent to saying that if people are bored out of their mind it’s their fault for not appreciating your intellect.⁷ I would not recommend adopting this attitude, but you do you.

Storytelling

Now why should you care about storytelling? You should care because it’s your primary method of influencing your audience’s emotional state. The story arc is what enables you to take your audience from wherever they are at the beginning and guide them towards the emotional state you want. The better of a storyteller you are, the further you can move your audience. People enjoy a good story exactly because it allows them to forget their own emotional baseline for a moment.

But what about the concerns that storytelling is equivalent to manipulating the audience or making things up, just to tell a story? First, I never said you should make things up. I said a story is “a collection of observations, facts, or events presented in a specific order such that they create an emotional reaction.” None of the observations, facts, or events should be made up, unless you’re explicitly presenting fiction. I’m not asking you to say anything that isn’t true. Neither am I asking you to just bend the truth a bit. I’m simply encouraging you to present your material in such a way that your audience can connect with it.

Second, yes, a good storyteller can manipulate their audience, but doing so is a conscious choice, not an unavoidable consequence of telling a story. Any useful skill can be used for malicious purposes. That is not an argument against developing new skills. Imagine you were telling me you are learning how to cook and my response was that most good-tasting recipes contain too much fat and sugar and people who cook well just want their family to get fat. Would you find that convincing? Or would you maybe object that the better you can cook the more you can prepare healthy meals that keep your family fit? It’s the same with storytelling. If you know how stories are constructed and why they work, you can tell an exciting story that does not manipulate your audience. And as a bonus, you will also get better at recognizing when somebody else is trying to manipulate you.

Summary

Regardless of how interesting and logically sound your work is, you will have to craft it into an engaging story if you want to reach a larger audience. The purpose of storytelling is not to manipulate. It is to overcome your audience’s inertia, most importantly boredom and disinterest. If your audience is bored, they won’t put in the effort to discover why what you’re doing is actually interesting. They simply won’t care. So, you have to do everything you can to make them care. And that will in general involve telling an interesting story.

More from Genes, Minds, Machines

1. This theme is brought up in this comment on my prior article.

2. This theme is brought up in this comment on my prior article.

3. Grant rejections are always blamed on low enthusiasm. Because in the end, enthusiasm is the only thing that matters. If your reviewers are excited about your proposal, it will get funded, regardless of whatever major logical gaps your proposal narrative contains. In fact, if reviewers are enthusiastic, gaps are “minor issues the PI certainly can work out.” If reviewers are not enthusiastic, gaps are “critical flaws that invalidate the entire proposal.” The enthusiasm drives how reviewers perceive the gaps. It’s not the other way round.

4. See for example this study in the scientific journal Cognition and Emotion.

5. I’m not claiming I routinely achieve this goal. I’m just stating what I want.

6. A small fraction of people may truly feel no emotions, but such people are never going to be the majority of your audience. And to the extent they are in your audience, they will likely have severe depression or PTSD and you may have difficult reaching them anyways.

7. Remember, boredom is an emotion. If you don’t elicit a specific emotional response in your audience, they are free to experience any emotion, including boredom.