The virtue of ‘show, don’t tell’ in writing, including in journalism, lies in its power to create a more vivid, immersive, and emotionally engaging reading experience. Instead of simply providing information or summarising events, the technique encourages writers to use evocative imagery, action, dialogue, and sensory details to invite readers into the world of the story.

The idea is that once they’re in there, they’ll be able to do a lot of the task of engaging for you.

However, perhaps this depends on the world the reader is being invited to enter.

There’s an episode in season 10 of ‘Friends’ where a palaeontologist tells Joey she doesn’t own a TV. Joey is confused and asks, “Then what’s all your furniture pointed at?”

Most of the (textual) journalism of physics I’m seeing these days frames narratives around the application of some discovery or concept. For example, here’s the last paragraph of one of the top articles on Physics World today:

The trio hopes that its technique will help us understand polaron behaviours. “The method we developed could also help study strong interactions between light and matter, or even provide the blueprint to efficiently add up Feynman diagrams in entirely different physical theories,” Bernardi says. In turn, it could help to provide deeper insights into a variety of effects where polarons contribute – including electrical transport, spectroscopy, and superconductivity.

I’m not sure if there’s something implicitly bad about this framing but I do believe it gives the impression that the research is in pursuit of those applications, which in my view is often misguided. Scientific research is incremental and theories and data often takes many turns before they can be stitched together cleanly enough for a technological application in the real world.

Yet I’m also aware that, just like pointing all your furniture at the TV can simplify your decisions about arranging your house, drafting narratives in order to convey the relevance of some research for specific applications can help hold readers’ attention better. Yes, this is a populist approach to the extent that it panders to what readers know they want rather than what they may not know, but it’s useful — especially when the communicator or journalist is pressed for time and/or doesn’t have the mental bandwidth to craft a thoughtful narrative.

But this narrative choice may also imply a partial triumph of “tell, don’t show” over “show, don’t tell”. This is because the narrative has an incentive to restrict itself to communicating whatever physics is required to describe the technology and still be considered complete rather than wade into waters that will potentially complicate the narrative.

A closely related issue here is that a lot of physics worth knowing about — if for no reason other than that they’re windows into scientists’ spirit and ingenuity — is quite involved. (It doesn’t help that it’s also mostly mathematical.) The concepts are simply impossible to show, at least not without the liberal use of metaphors and, inevitably, some oversimplification.

Of course, it’s not possible to compare a physics news piece in Physics World with that in The Hindu: the former will be able to show more by telling itself because its target audience is physicists and other scientists, and they will see more detail in the word “polaron” than readers of The Hindu can be expected to. But even if The Hindu’s readers need more showing, I can’t show them the physics without expecting they will be interested in complicated theoretical ideas.

In fact, I’ll be hard-pressed to be a better communicator than if I resorted to telling. Thus my lesson is that ‘show, don’t tell’ isn’t always a virtue. Sometimes what you show can bore or maybe scare readers off, and for reasons that have nothing to do with your skills as a communicator. Obviously the point isn’t to condescend readers here. Instead, we need to acknowledge that telling is virtuous in its own right, and in the proper context may be the more engaging way to communicate science.