Do reviewers tell you that your writing is choppy, doesn’t flow well or, worse, is incoherent? Are you stumped about how to address this problem? In writing a scientific paper, it’s necessary to craft a narrative that guides your readers and helps them follow your thought processes. In an earlier video, I described how scientific papers follow a story arc: Introduction (what I studied and why), Methods (how I did it), Results (what I found), and Discussion (what it means). In this new video, I show how to improve flow by ensuring each paper section, subsection, and paragraph follows a story arc to make a clear point and that all narrative units are written to form a coherent whole.

By the way, these tips about writing and using a story arc will help you make better videos. I’ve covered in a previous video how storytelling techniques can help you make a better video about science.