How To Tell a Great Story, Part 2: Style

You may have noticed something ironic about anthropology. Anthropologists tend to be passionate advocates of inclusivity. Yet the conventions of academic publishing mean there are countless anthropological articles advocating inclusion that sound like this: “We contend that these foci, undergirded by Spinozist-Deleuzian approaches, trouble traditional conceptions of personhood and resituate the process of attribution away from figurations based on the internalization of external relations.”

The number of people who can understand that sentence could fit comfortably in a closet.

Jargon is appropriate when you’re communicating with fellow specialists. But jargon excludes most of the world’s population, both because it’s obscure and because it’s usually brain-draining, even to people who understand it.

Throughout this section, we’ll show you that using accessible language does not mean “dumbing things down.” Writing engagingly requires creativity and savvy. It also requires knowing each concept so thoroughly that you’re able to reshape it in multiple ways while maintaining its integrity.

How can you transform academese into engaging language? First, imagine you’re having coffee with a friend who represents your target audience for public writing: an intelligent, well-informed person who does not work in your field and who knows nothing about your research. Then talk with the friend, either in your mind or out loud. How would you explain your ideas to them? What do you think would most interest them? Is there an analogy that would help them understand a concept? The language you use in this hypothetical conversation will probably sound a lot like the language you should use in your article.

Let’s look at how the coffee-with-a-friend exercise can give academic writing a makeover. In the Knowable magazine essay “Leaning Into Indigenous Knowledge on Climate Change,” writer Chris Baraniuk draws on an article in the Annual Review of Anthropology that includes sentences like this:

Now we don’t know if Baraniuk imagined explaining that to a friend over coffee. But it sounds like he did. Because this is his nut graf in the Knowable article, and it effectively translates the above jargon into accessible sentences:

Note how the Annual Review of Anthropology article tends to use passive sentence structure, which is common in academese. In passive voice, the subject receives the action, and the person doing the action is often unmentioned (“observations … are well documented”).

The journalistic article employs active voice, in which the subject performs the action (“scientists are learning”). Writing in active voice is one of the easiest ways to transform academese into journalistic writing. It makes sentences more dynamic, straightforward, and easy to visualize.

Another effective method of giving academic writing a makeover is to provide examples that are visual, visceral, and tangible. For example, the same Knowable essay drew from another Annual Reviews article that features the kind of general, list-like sentences one often finds in academic journals:

Can you visualize “local social-ecological indicators”? Can you touch, taste, or smell them?

No.

So they wash over the reader’s mind like floodwaters over a desert plain.

By contrast, the Knowable article describes Indigenous people observing the sight of a spring morel mushroom in September, the sound of maple sap freezing and cracking the trees, tick outbreaks that make your skin crawl, and erosion creeping up a beach until there’s no more room for a fish trap that laid there for decades. Those descriptions soak into a reader’s mind and stay there. That’s because sensorial experience is the stuff of story—and the stuff of life.

When you’re giving academic writing a jargon-free makeover, focus on telling a story. Here’s an example. In her original paper in Current Anthropology, anthropologist Karen L. Kramer (and biostatistician Garnett P. McMillan) describe the effects of new technology on the reproductive outcomes of Maya women:

In her SAPIENS essay based partly on this article, Kramer didn’t bother to use and explain the words “anovulation,” “nulliparous,” and “luteal.” Defining jargon terms or replacing them with their definitions is rarely the best approach. If definitions were interesting, people would read dictionaries at book clubs. Instead, Kramer focuses on telling a story:

Note how this jargon-free version unfolds almost like a movie. You can picture scenes with women hauling water and hand-cranking maize. Then, like in a film, an incident happens that moves the plot forward, altering the women’s routines and bodies. Kramer entertains readers with playful puns (“bump in fertility”). And she helps readers process the information with a straight-up explanation of why these facts are important.

Is it ever OK to use jargon in public writing? Yes. If a term people may not fully understand—say, mitochondrial DNA, Acheulean hand axes, or the name of a rare health condition—is central to your article, and you’re going to have to repeat the term multiple times, it’s perfectly fine to use and define it.

A word of caution, though. In academic journals, writers are typically expected to relate their ideas to theories or ways of thinking, such as functionalism or cyborg feminism. The definitions of these jargon terms typically include more jargon terms. It’s often jargon all the way down.

So in almost all cases, avoid naming little-known theories when writing for the public.

Mark Twain popularized the saying: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” Lightning words can shimmer on the page or hit like a gut-punch. Choosing the right word is one of the most fun parts of writing, and it absolutely transforms articles.

That doesn’t mean you need to pack every sentence with fancy-schmancy, multisyllabic words. Those essays feel like fruitcake topped with cookie-dough ice cream drowned in salted caramel sauce. It’s too much.

Instead, zero in on your verbs and see if you can kick them up a notch. Pay special attention to “to be” verbs like “is,” “are,” “was,” and “were,” and try substituting a more interesting verb or reconstructing your sentence to avoid the “to be” verb. Instead of “We were hot and sweaty,” try “Sweat stung our eyes and poured down our flushed faces.” Instead of “The gym is noisy with the sound of dumbbells hitting the floor,” try, as anthropologist Cara Ocobock writes, “My body reverberates with the clangs of hundreds of pounds being dropped repeatedly on the floor.”

Replacing a ho-hum verb with a powerful action word gives you more bang for your buck than adding adjectives and adverbs. Lightning verbs are likely to do one or more of the following:

• Conjure a visual image: sparkle, splash, sidestep, blur, orbit.
• Evoke a visceral feeling: ache, clutch, squeeze, shoulder, muscle in.
• Sound like what they mean: ooze, squiggle, gulp, plunk, screech, rattle.
• Sound powerful: supercharge, skyrocket, galvanize, emblazon.
• Sound fun: hoodwink, bamboozle, lollygag, flabbergast, vamoose.

In addition, lean toward verbs and other words that convey your desired tone and fit with your theme. If you’re writing about cooking, you could say, “She peppered the culinary archaeologist with questions” or “The new study set off a simmering debate.” If you’re writing about something darker or more serious, puns would probably be inappropriate. But you could choose verbs that sound harsh, bleak, somber, or whatever mood you want to evoke.

Sometimes lightning verbs emerge from picturing a scene or an action in your mind’s eye and using words in innovative ways. It’s kind of like finding a new use for a tool. Consider the following passages from “The Snarled Lines of Justice,” which a group of eight anthropologists and other scholars wrote for the environmental publication Orion:

In addition to revamping your verbs, look over your article and see if you repeat certain words over and over. You’ll almost inevitably restate nouns central to your topic; these repetitions are opportunities to provide more information and color.

Let’s say you’re writing about ayahuasca, and you notice you overuse the word. You could instead say “traditional plant medicine,” “psychedelic substance,” “psychoactive Amazonian drink,” “powerful entheogen,” or “thick, brown brew that tastes of prune juice and burnt coffee.” Replacing a noun with a phrase that provides information sometimes allows you to remove boring “to be” verbs and recombine your sentences in ways that are more efficient and interesting.

Irish poet John O’Donohue once said, “Music is what language would love to be if it could.” Great writing does indeed sound musical. Rhythm, speed, and percussiveness absolutely matter to the reading experience.

As we said in Module 4, your first section should be fast-paced. Think the booming, racing beginning of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Then your essay can slow down for a while. But it has to speed up again, or readers will nod off. So if you notice a section is dragging, follow it with another section that accelerates the pace.

Things that speed up the reading experience are character-driven stories, dynamic action, fun or moving quotes, colorful details, short paragraphs, and short sentences. Things that slow down the reading experience include historical context, explanations of methodology or concepts, discussions of theory, jargon, long paragraphs, and long sentences.

Rhythm also matters at the sentence level. If you’re familiar with certain types of traditional drumming, you know that an unvarying beat can literally put people into a trance. You do not want to put readers into a trance. So it’s essential to vary the length and rhythm of your sentences.

Let’s examine the Washington Post op-ed “We Have Slashed and Burned the Core Features of Childhood.” In her lead, evolutionary anthropologist Dorsa Amir begins with longer sentences that flow like violin music. Then, when she makes her main points, she uses shorter sentences that land like drumbeats:

If you really want something to reverberate in people’s minds, put it into a short, percussive sentence. And put the most important part (or the most surprising or funny part) at the end of the sentence, so it sounds like a mic drop.