How to write your paper like a page turner
Working my way through scientific articles I often lose my focus. Not that it isn’t interesting, but the reading of it is not attractive. This can be because it is written to dense, with long winding sentences full of jargon. But often this also comes because the writing lacks tension.
Tension, suspense, or narrative arc in a story is the stuff that keeps the reader going. When it is lacking the text is no longer a story but a summing up of dry facts. When it is there the text reads like a page turner that you can’t put down.
Now not every kind of text needs to have some form of narrative arc, if it is just one or two paragraphs long most readers manage to get through without. But longer text like papers do benefit from it.
Although a scientific paper is hold to different standards than a page turning thriller, that doesn’t mean that it can’t have some suspense.
Suspense is the cliffhanger at the end of an episode, like an accident, whereby you need to wait till the next episode, or haven forbid, the next season, to see who survived. To create suspense however you don’t always have to be that dramatic. You can also introduce it by putting forward small, interesting questions that don’t get directly answered.
So how do you work this into your scientific paper?
Like any story a scientific paper is build up out of a beginning, a.k.a. your introduction, middle, where the stuff happens, and an end, where is made sense of what has happened.
In your introduction you set up the tension by introducing the literature gap that you aim to fill, as discussed in last weeks post. After you introduce the main question of your paper, you tease the reader a little bit with giving a very basic answer, that in itself is not satisfying enough, but hints that there is more. This is the start of your narrative arc that will run all the way to your conclusion, your main message.
To keep this narrative arc stretched like the string of a bow it is important you drop clues throughout the paper leading to the answer of your main question. These clues are your results. To keep the tension in your story two things are important here. The first is the order you present your clues in, the second is the number clues you show.
Let’s start with that last one. While it is good scientific practice to answer a question from multiple angels. Like when you are analysing protein-protein interactions you do this both in situ and in vitro, and often both through multiple approaches. When they all give the same outcome, then describing the results of each of these approaches can come to feel repetitive for the reader, taking the flow out of the story. While it can be important to include them all, it is best to focus in the paper on one in situ and one in vitro experiment, while mentioning in passing the additional experiments you did that gave the same results (which you show in the supplementary data).
Now this is, of course, if all those experiments give the same answer. If they don’t, you need to mention that and go over them. They need to be included as they lead to a new question, and possible a plot twist 😉.
The next question is , in what order do you drop your clues. Sometimes that order follows logically as the results from one experiment leads to a question that is answered by the next experiment. At other times the clues are less interconnected, making the order less obvious. Then you the writer needs to look at which clues might give away other clues. Or at which clues the reader need to read first in order to understand the other clues. This can be a complicated puzzle. But take time to solve it, don’t be afraid to try different orders.
Now what I said here for the order of your results in your results section also counts for the order you discuss your results in the discussion; this by the way doesn’t have to be in the same order. Try out what works best for the readers to come to see your main message as the logical answer to the main question, the gap, that you introduced in the beginning.
Now you have determined the order of your clues and the discussion of them, but how do you keep the suspense in your writing?
Each clue is often both an answer to a question and generates a new question. For you to keep the suspense you should not directly answer each question after raising them. You do this as follow: First your mention the question, then you go over how you find the answer, describing the experiment you did, before you give the results of that experiment that are the answer to the question.
Other contributing factors of keeping or losing the suspense and the flow of your paper are:
Sentence length, short sentences are read faster, while a long sentence once in a while can be used to emphasize important points (but don’t make them too long).
The amount of jargon and abbreviations used, lots of jargon and abbreviations slows the reader down and kills the suspense.
Prompt
Set the timer at 10 min and write about your project as if you are a detective trying to solve a crime scene. Focus on one scene/part for now.
Happy writing,
PS: let me know in the comments if you have any questions