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SciCom - Mastering Storytelling
Published 6 months ago • 3 min read
Mastering Storytelling
Hi Reader, how often are we advised to tell a good story?
Problematically, this advice is imprecise because the word ‘story’ is used in two different ways.
Yet, most people don’t know this and end up with a crowded and confusing poster, presentation, or article.
Yes, this topic is subjective, so only take away what you feel is right.
But my goal is to help you bring structure into your communication:
What It Really Is
As mentioned, people generally talk about stories but actually refer to two different meanings.
Watch this as inspiration for scientific storytelling. Whether it is salt causing hypertension, mutations causing cancer, or caloric excess causing overweight, there are several stories that have succeeded in science. It doesn’t matter whether they are true or not—observe what makes people so attracted to them. This is what you need to do in your poster as well. The picture on the right illustrates the gut–brain axis and how inflammation influences mental states such as anxiety.
The first refers to a framework that makes it easy for people to identify with one (or several) main characters and is therefore highly emotionally engaging.
The second meaning refers to delivering a coherent line of thought that allows the listener to understand the context of a given piece of work.
For posters, we normally build on the second meaning, largely because of the limitation in length.
Building a Framework
The point of this kind of storytelling is not to be emotional or to tell personal history.
It is about giving people a structure. This should guide them and help put your data into perspective by providing context.
Most people think about each section individually, focusing on how to make the information in each stand out. Another approach is to view them all as contributions - steps toward one key message. You decide which sections help you tell the story and which will be most memorable.
Sounds complicated, but all you need to do is find the one-sentence key takeaway you want to communicate.
It could be: Group B antibiotics inhibit bacterial growth by 50% through binding to the ABC receptor.
But also: Two π–π interactions, which can only be found through cryo-electron tomography, hold together the second arm of the ABC enzyme.
Just follow up on each word/section of this sentence you will see all the parts of your story.
No Direction, No Curiosity
The magic of telling such a coherent story lies in ensuring that your reader always has a foundation that prepares them for what comes next.
Watch this trailer of a horror movie to understand the idea behind guiding attention and revealing information step by step. The idea is simple: if a horror movie teases the appearance of a monster, you stay engaged until you finally see it. That is why people watch them. If you were alone in a dark forest, you would only feel anxious, not curious—because you wouldn’t know what to look for. This is what we want to create with our posters too: showing people why we do our research - which makes them curious about what we present—and, after explaining our setup, preparing them to understand what we found and, finally, the implications for the future. This picture is from the movie Babadook - a truly scary film with a strong revelatory arc in my opinion.
For effective storytelling of any kind, you must have a clear focus in each section.
If you have a single key message in mind, you will be able to decide what each section should tell the reader to make them ready for the next - just like a movie or series that reveals more and more with every minute you watch.
Otherwise, you just list information and the viewer has to assemble it themselves.
Let’s make it short. If you create a poster you just want:
Background: what has been done before and why you are asking this question (what the “shape of the monster” is).
Methods: what you did (and, to make it outstanding, why you did it this way).
Results: not there to show how much you worked. They exist to provide proof for your conclusion—based on distribution and statistics, how certain we can be about it.
Outlook: what the implication is, what is about to come, and where people can find more.
Many scientists forget that every piece of information that doesn’t contribute to the main story distracts and confuses.
Always Remember
You pay a price for every sentence. If it isn’t interesting or relevant, you don’t just waste space - you make your poster less engaging.
Unlike what we normally associate with “storytelling,” for your poster it does not mean narrating your struggle.
The story you tell is instead a simple, understandable framework that delivers the right information at the right time so your viewer learns something new with minimal effort.
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