ABSTRACT
This chapter shows a debate between a scientist and a visual journalism professor over whether scientists should use storytelling elements to convey their findings. Narrative journalism makes extensive use of literature's arsenal of structural and linguistic elements. Applying fiction-writing techniques to journalistic stories at first sounds like a contradiction. Narrative journalism is a subset of narrative non-fiction writing, such as biographies or encyclopaedias. Critics of narrative journalism argue that narratives are in and of themselves persuasive and invite journalists to cherry-pick their facts and mould them into the narrative. Sometimes, that is not too difficult, as some scientists already present their findings using journalism-friendly structures. In that sense, some scientists and journalists have hotly debated whether storytelling techniques are an appropriate tool to depict the complexity of science and its associated uncertainty. It is no wonder that scientists sometimes harshly critique storytellers who inaccurately depict science despite telling compelling stories.
