From the Editors Being Scheherazade: the Importance of Storytelling in Academic Writing

We have two jobs as scholars: Answering interesting questions and telling the story. Numerous books, articles, and “From the Editors” columns are dedicated to the former, but precious little attention is given to the latter. Indeed, many in our field do not recognize the importance of storytelling to academic success. The written word is the principal medium we use to transmit our ideas to the world. If we want our insights to influence management research and practice, we need to pay as much attention to the craft of writing and storytelling as we do to identifying and answering interesting questions. This applies equally to quantitative and qualitative researchers. Nothing puts a knife through our hearts quicker than someone referring to our job as producing “research reports.” If that’s how you think about what you write, the battle is already lost. Your interesting ideas and findings will be buried under a desert of barren prose, revealed only to those willing to endure the tedious archeological dig necessary to excavate them. In this column, our goal is to highlight key elements of storytelling and how they can enhance the impact of your academic writing. We will not discuss writing and publishing in the social sciences generally (e.g., Huff, 1999), how to write clearly (e.g., Ragins, 2012), or the ins and outs of grammar (e.g., Strunk & White, 2000). While these are important topics, they’ve already been given excellent treatments. Instead, we focus on the narrative elements of storytelling, and the process of crafting a story. We draw insight from books on effective writing by novelists and writing experts. Unlike Scheherazade, the storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights, keeping our readers interested isn’t a matter of life and death. But, we can make our stories stronger and enhance their impact by spending time inside the heads of master storytellers.