What Is the Story You Want to Tell? Utilizing the Narrative Arc as an Academic Writing Framework for Graduate Students in Health Promotion

Abstract

Writing well is an important skill for graduate students to learn. We contend that viewing the writing process through the lens of storytelling and narrative helps graduate students make clearer, more compelling cases in their academic writing. Mapping the movements of the classic narrative arc onto the Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRAD) format of health promotion writing can help authors engage in the writing process more thoroughly because we are socially trained to organize information in narrative forms. This commentary examines the narrative framework in relation to writing, reading, and synthesizing academic literature. We conclude that graduate students will benefit from seeing themselves as health promotion storytellers.