How To Tell a Great Story, Part 2: Style

Like sensuous description, characters can bring your story to life and make readers care about your topic.

Writing about people and the interesting things they say and do can be a lot of fun. It can also be a minefield of potentially biased and even offensive characterizations or, on the flip side, flat and generic depictions. So whether you’re profiling one person or mentioning several people as part of a larger story, here’s how to approach character development, and how not to.

Many anthropologists may be reluctant to include character descriptions in their writing, perhaps because they want to protect their interlocutors’ anonymity and/or because they may think such descriptions are more suited to fiction than to scientific discourse. However, not including any meaningful character description could do a disservice to your interlocutors by not portraying their humanity, complexity, and relatability.

If you’re concerned about including identifying features, you could instead highlight sensory details about the setting, or describe some aspect(s) of the person’s home or workplace. You might evoke the collective emotions in a community, such as tension, excitement, fear, or ebullience. Or consider taking a cue from Maya Angelou and describe how the person made you feel. Some people immediately soothe you into an almost meditative state. Others are the human equivalent of caffeine. Some people command attention with a magnetic presence. Others quietly captivate with a mysterious aura.

When you’re choosing which details to include, highlight those aspects of a person’s character that are key to the story you’re trying to tell and are the most interesting. In “When Coffee Is Like Angel Cake With Strawberry Jam,” anthropologist Edward F. Fischer explores the rarified world of specialty coffee. Wisely, he humanizes this topic and makes it more accessible by spotlighting specialty coffee brewer Elika Liftee.

Fischer writes: “Born in Japan to an Air Force mother and a Hawaiian father, Liftee grew up in Oklahoma—a typical Midwestern childhood, as he describes it, but with a kitchen stocked full of papaya, guava, and other tropical foods.” Mentioning the fruit in Liftee’s childhood kitchen adds color and personality to the essay. But most importantly, it’s central to the story. Later in the article, we learn that Liftee brews fruity coffees that remind him of his heritage, and this flavor profile is becoming increasingly popular in the specialty coffee arena.

If you Google Liftee’s name, you’ll see he has red-framed glasses and a beard. But the writer doesn’t mention this. Why? Because it doesn’t change the taste of his coffee. And that’s what the article is about.

Describing someone’s physical appearance and clothing can be appropriate and even essential. In this SAPIENS essay, writer Keridwen Cornelius explains that experimental archaeologist Bill Schindler wears brain-tanned buckskin clothing, has a hand-poked tattoo based on a 9,600-year-old bone inscription, and was previously overweight. Why? Because that’s what the article is about: Schindler’s interest in Stone Age skills and his struggles with metabolic syndrome inspired him to focus his career on ancestral diets.

In most cases, though, people’s appearance and clothing are not pertinent to an article. And your description could be influenced by unconscious biases. For example, according to one study, journalists described female scientists’ physical appearance half the time but male scientists’ appearance just one-fifth of the time. Eek!

When it comes to using quotes, you can trust your instincts a bit more. You don’t have to be a screenwriter to know a great line when you hear one. But in journalistic writing, as in screenwriting, it’s important to know when to use exposition and when to use dialogue.

If your interlocutor is explaining something in generalities, you’re better off paraphrasing the person and adding fascinating details from various sources. Great quotes are more likely to be emotionally moving statements, funny one-liners, brilliant analogies, or bold opinions. In other words, they’ve said something in a way that you can’t.

In this SAPIENS essay about people who lost their sense of smell after contracting COVID-19, anthropologist Sarah Ives incorporates several colorful, heartfelt quotes. Her interlocutors express heartbreak and fear over not being able to smell Christmas trees, their boyfriend’s skin, rotten food, or a stove on fire. In this photo essay about potential reunification in Cyprus, anthropologist Anna Antoniou effectively uses opinion-based quotes from Greek and Turkish Cypriots to explore the conflicts and commonalities between the two groups.

When you’re reading your rough draft, you’ll often notice that some sentences and paragraphs flow together well, and you feel a satisfying momentum building when reading them. Then suddenly everything comes to a screeching halt. You wonder, “Wait, how did I get from that thought to that thought?”

The solution is transitions. Effective transitions can connect ideas logically. Without them, sometimes readers will miss your point, even if you think it’s clear. Transitions can also act as cliffhangers, catapulting readers into the next section. They can transform a clunky, disjointed essay into a reading experience that flows as sinuously as a symphony.

But how?

(See how that works?)

Transitions can be placed between sections, paragraphs, or sentences. Usually, the goal of a transition between sections is to generate suspense that motivates people to keep reading. One way to do this is to end a section by creating a question in your reader’s mind that you then answer in the subsequent section.

For example, in “Inside Mexico City’s Surveillance State,” anthropologist Esteban Salmón ends a section with this sentence: “Still, surveillance technology is prone to numerous problems, from technological glitches to cognitive biases to outright cover-ups.” That makes readers ask: “What kind of glitches, biases, and cover-ups are undermining surveillance?”

Then they’ll see that the next section is subtitled “THE FLAWS IN SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS,” and they’ll likely read on to find the answers to their question.

Later in the same article, the author uses a different transition style. In this instance, the first sentence in the new section effectively reaches back and grabs the baton from the previous section:

Try reading that segment again without “For all the above reasons.” It still makes sense. But it doesn’t flow nearly as well, and the logical link between the sections isn’t quite as obvious.

When transitioning between sentences or paragraphs, you could use transition words or phrases, which can appear at the beginning, middle, or end of a sentence. Or you could repeat words from one sentence or paragraph in the next one.

In the following example, from “Writing Indigenous Oral Tradition to Fight a Dam,” anthropologist Karminn C.D. Daytec Yañgot uses transition phrases between sentences. And she transitions between paragraphs by echoing words about loss:

Another way to create cohesion from one sentence to the next can be characterized as the AB, BC, CD method. Each letter represents a word or concept. The writer uses a word in the first sentence, threads that word (or a synonym) into the second sentence, and then incorporates a new concept. Then that new concept gets threaded into the third sentence. In this way, all the sentences feel sewn together.

Here’s an example: “The garden provided a home for numerous species (A). Among the many animals (A), peacocks caught Emily’s (B) attention. She (B) was a biologist who usually studied mammals, but her latest project (C) featured the feathered wonders. That study (C) garnered her a reputation as an eco-feminist scholar.”

Sometimes you need to make multiple points in a section, and you can’t figure out how to get one paragraph to flow into the next. When that happens, you may be missing a logical step and need to add a paragraph. Often, though, all the elements are there, but they’re not in the best order. Try playing around with cut and paste, and see if changing the sequence of your paragraphs helps everything fall into place.

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.