It turns out that even in the world of scientific writing, your eighth-grade teacher was right: how you write can matter as much as what you write.
In a study published Dec. 15 in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers from the University of Washington looked at 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 than of 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.
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