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What's it take to make storytelling more than a buzzword in scicomm?

Tl;dr/navel gazing alert: This is a process and thinking out loud post. If you want to jump to the storytelling resources I've linked to, just head to the bottom.

Screenshot of a slide that depicts a mouse telling a lot of other animals a story. (It is an illustration from john Tenniel's 1865 illustrations for the satire novel Alice in Wonderland.)
Image: Sir John Tenniel, 1865

I am fairly ambivalent about the trend of storytelling in scicomm. Like many dimensions of scicomm or other "make science/sharing science/academia better" schemes, storytelling has been so widely prescribed that it is now abstract. When an effort toward improvement, or a recommended tool, is abstracted, it becomes virtually meaningless, in part because people just starting out with it cannot access meaningful discussion of how to do or use it [1].

I have this concern about storytelling even though I have a lot of experience writing stories. I've done a lot of freelancing for newspapers and magazines, wrote children's stories about science, and even trained in creative writing. I have also taught workshops and semester-long courses using narrative/creative writing/storytelling techniques to improve everything from grad students' mental health around writing to faculty members' grant writing efforts. I get invited to do workshops and talks on storytelling with some frequency, perhaps in part thanks to my transdisciplinary research (and writing and exhibit) on one of the world's most familiar fables: the tortoise and the hare. And, I love children's books. I was a voracious reader as a kid, and I collect children's books as the ultimate examples of compelling visual + textual storytelling.


With this kind of experience, it should be easy to get on the storytelling train. But, I remain conflicted.


Lots out there about why storytelling

I was thinking consciously about all that earlier this week, as I prepped for another workshop on storytelling for scicomm. I reread the values + storytelling paper I led a couple years ago. And, I went through every reference I've squirreled away for teaching about storytelling.


Lots of interesting papers and commentaries exist. They talk about an astounding array of topics that are especially fun to think about if you're nerdy about storytelling. Here are just a few of my favorites:

  • There are 8 standard plots found in earth science papers (can someone please do this for conservation bio and scicomm!?!) [2]

  • Old women are historically maligned in stories [3]

  • We've been telling stories for millennia and nerding out about them almost as long (think Aristotle) [4]

  • Narrative techniques can make health care more equitable. [5]


But, I never found a single paper that articulated how to actually make a story out of science.


The only references I've found for making storytelling make sense are books, primarily by science writers or professional storytellers. That realization pushed me to a deep-dive into the hundreds of scicomm workshops I've led. I scavenged through my past slides and facilitation plans, looking for hands-on activities I could stitch together to make the necessary winnowing and prioritizing of storytelling feel a bit more tangible.


But what about the how of storytelling?

To pull all this together for the workshop, I aimed to help participants focus on making some transitions from our typical training. That is, I emphasized the mechanics of moving from "neutrality" to embracing the humanity of being a person doing science and aiming to connect to communities about and through it.


I asked participants to think about their own goals, how they define stories, and to acknowledge their values. Then we explored how to connect these ideas to effective messaging and identifying plot points in their own work. That's quite a lot of work to squeeze into 50 minutes, and that time constraint meant we could not get far enough to actually write or outline a story.


Not actually doing any "storying" led someone at the end to remark that thinking about some of the component parts of stories was helpful. But also, they wondered: "Does it get easier if you do more of it?" And, I instantly said yes. Because, that's the whole tricky part of storytelling as a tool. When we zoom out from the deeply embedded ways that stories are already (and have always been) part of being human, we start to think of stories as these discrete chunks of "what to do" rather than what we all do to relate, connect, learn, and make sense of the world. And if we're talking about it as a tool, yes, you can get better at it. A combo of training and practice will get you there.


My bottom line

I do think storytelling is a valuable part of science communication (and even scientific communication). But, even after leading this training and others in the past, I still don't love how we (a) frame it as a technique in ways that make people self-conscious about it, and (b) point at it but don't really give people enough time to practice it as a deliberate tool. I'm hoping the mini bibliography I built as I was developing this most recent workshop will be a tool that folks can use to think more about how we already use and share stories.


 

NOTES

[1] Consider, for example, "buzzy" concepts/movements like reflection, metacognition (look for chapter 1), or transferable skills. See those links for some nerdy reading on how those terms and movements have become abstract to the point of meaninglessness.


[2] Phillips, J. 2012. Storytelling in Earth sciences: The eight basic plots. Earth-Science Reviews 111(3): 153-162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2012.09.005


[3] Hennenberg, S. 2010. Moms do badly, but grandmas do worse: The nexus of sexism and ageism in children's classics. Journal of Aging Studies 24(2): 125-134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2008.10.003


[4] Boyd, R.L., K.G. Blackburn, and J.W. Pennebaker. 2020. The narrative arc: Revealing core narrative structures through text analysis. Science Advances 6: eaba2196. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aba2196 


[5] Delistraty, C.C. (2014, November 2). The Psychological Comforts of Storytelling. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/11/thepsychological-comforts-of-storytelling/381964/.


Murphy, S.T., L.B. Frank, J.S. Chatterjee, and L. Baezconde-Garbanati. 2013. Narrative versus nonnarrative: the role of identification, transportation, and emotion in reducing health disparities: narrative vs. nonnarrative. Journal of Communication 63: 116–137. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12007

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commnatural sciencecommunication research & practice Bethann Garramon Merkle

© 2025 by Bethann Garramon Merkle.

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