Congratulations to SMEA graduate Annie Hillier and SMEA professors Ryan Kelly and Terrie Klinger! Their article “Narrative Style Influences Citation Frequency in Climate Change Science” published December 15 in the journal PLOS ONE, looked at the abstracts from more than 700 scientific papers about climate change to find out what makes a paper influential in its field. Rather than focusing on content, they looked at writing style. Their idea was that papers written in a more narrative style — those that tell a story — might be more influential than those with a drier, more expository style. What they found was that the most highly cited papers tended to include elements like sensory language, a greater degree of language indicating cause-and-effect and a direct appeal to the reader for a particular follow-up action. Read the UW Today article.