A Writing Case Study
file under: PROCESS NOTES
this one is from: ED(!)
A quick note: this is a cross-post from Ed Yong’s newsletter, The Ed’s Up. In this post, Ed’s talking about some of his work as the writing instructor on the USC StoryMakers Program, which is an immersive creative retreat for environmental scientists and is Liminal’s flagship project. Ed is a ‘cloud member’ of Liminal—we’re so excited that we get to work with him, and share his insights here!
Every June, since 2022, I’ve spent a week on Catalina Island to support the USC Storymakers Program—an initiative created by my wife Liz Neeley to train environmental scientists in the art of storytelling. Liz and her co-conspirator Victoria Fine designed the program to pull researchers away from the ceaseless grind of academia, and put them in a beautiful space in which they can exhale, think, learn new skills, and form community. It’s summer camp for mid-career academics. Almost every fellow has talked about Storymakers as a life/career-changing experience.
I mention all of this because I’m the writing instructor for the week. Teaching isn’t something that comes naturally or easily to me, but I love how it forces me to deconstruct my own process—to explain how and why I make certain writing choices. Indeed, I spend much of my workshop emphasizing that writing is not a nebulous, magical skill, but an act of practiced intentionality. You have to know what you’re trying to achieve, and the clearer you are about those goals, the easier the work becomes.
Let me show you what I mean, by working through an example that I use on the island.
In July 2022, I read a fascinating paper by Jacob Bor and colleagues, which contextualized America’s pandemic’s deaths as part of a longstanding historical tragedy of broken healthcare and failed social systems. Here’s the abstract:
We assessed how many U.S. deaths would have been averted each year, 1933-2021, if U.S. age-specific mortality rates had equaled those of other wealthy nations. The annual number of excess deaths in the U.S. increased steadily beginning in the late 1970s, reaching 626,353 in 2019. Excess deaths surged during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, there were 1,092,293 “Missing Americans” and 25 million years of life lost due to excess mortality relative to peer nations. In 2021, half of all deaths under 65 years and 91% of the increase in under-65 mortality since 2019 would have been avoided if the U.S. had the mortality rates of its peers. Black and Native Americans made up a disproportionate share of Missing Americans, although the majority were White.
And here’s the first paragraph from the piece that I eventually wrote. The bracketed numbers don’t appear in the piece; I’ve added them here to mark out each sentence for easy discussion:
(1) Jacob Bor has been thinking about a parallel universe. (2) He envisions a world in which America has health on par with that of other wealthy nations, and is not an embarrassing outlier that, despite spending more on health care than any other country, has shorter life spans, higher rates of chronic disease and maternal mortality, and fewer doctors per capita than its peers. (3) Bor, an epidemiologist at Boston University School of Public Health, imagines the people who are still alive in that other world but who died in ours. (4) He calls such people “missing Americans.” (5) And he calculates that in 2021 alone, there were 1.1 million of them.
The start of any piece is known in journalism jargon as the lede. It should be a lure that entices readers and makes them want to read the rest of the story. It should be a trailer, which gives an accurate reflection of the content and tone to come. And it should be a flex, which demonstrates that the writer knows what they’re doing. It’s perhaps the single most important part of any piece of writing, and the part I spend the most time on. This paragraph took three fucking hours.
The original paper was very stats-heavy, and I wanted to find a compelling way of conveying its ideas without a bunch of cold numbers. And then I realized that at its core, this paper is about an alternative reality—a look at a world in which Americans died at the same lower rate as other wealthy nations. Hence sentence (1). Now, instead of a somewhat abstract block of stats, we begin with a protagonist who is basically daydreaming. It’s relatable, whimsical, and inviting.
Then things immediately get darker. U.S. exceptionalism was a huge challenge for this piece: as one source told me, many Americans simply don’t know “just how poorly we do as a country at letting people live to old age.” Sentence (2) was an attempt to get such readers up to speed very quickly, lest the very idea of this study crash into a wall of cognitive dissonance.
But it’s a long sentence, which sends us back into the more abstract realm of national health expenditure and chronic disease rates. I wanted to ground the reader again and give them an emotional tether to those trends. And it’s there in (3): Ultimately, all of this is about actual people who should be alive, but aren’t.
Sentence (4) introduces some jargon—the “Missing Americans” phrase that Bor used, and that I turn to throughout the piece. It continues the emotional thread from the previous sentence. These people aren’t just dead. They’re missing. There’s a sense of injustice here.
Finally, in sentence (5), we reveal how many there are. It stands alone as the only non-date number in the paragraph, which I think makes its impact land harder. And note: because sentence (3) casually dropped Bor’s qualifications, you’re not left wondering here how this otherwise random person came up with this shocking number. We get into the specifics later, but these small moves establish credibility early on.
Now, you may well dislike what I did, or have constructed the paragraph differently, but my point is that every part of this 108-word clump was very deliberately considered. What’s the key information I need to convey? How can I address yeah-buts in a subtle way? How can I establish the stakes? Can I create an emotional arc? The cadence is deliberate, too: short sentence; very long sentence; medium-length; short; short. (1) is a brisk on-ramp. (2) has you almost holding your breath. (4) and (5) should feel like punches. It’s all by design. Practiced intentionality.