What I Learned About Storytelling at the 2026 Science Writers and Communicators of Canada Conference

The theme of this year’s Science Writers and Communicators of Canada conference—Discovery. Dialogue. Decision. Navigating complexity to make sense of science—addressed challenges communicators face every day.

A communicator’s job is to make complex ideas clear to many different audiences. But that requires more than just translating technical language. We must turn complexity into meaning, uncertainty into dialogue, and understanding into informed decision-making.

At this year’s conference, storytelling kept coming up as a tool for conveying complex messages and sparking important conversations. I’ve gathered some insights below that showcase ways that theme showed up for me.

Careful curation for more powerful storytelling

In her opening keynote, Johanne Pelletier presented storytelling as a tool for knowledge mobilization. She explained that, in her coaching work, she borrows tools and ideas from storytelling to help scientists talk about their research.

By teaching storytelling techniques, she doesn’t just show them how to be more engaging; she shows them how to make choices about which stories to tell. Scientists (and science communicators) often work with vast amounts of research. Not everything can make it into the story. The question becomes, what to protect and what to leave out?

Good storytelling isn’t simplification for its own sake; it’s careful curation.

To illustrate this concept, Pelletier showed two photos: a large pile of raw spinach and a smaller, much reduced, portion of cooked spinach. It was the same spinach, but transformed into something that takes up less space and is easier to digest.

Good storytelling, then, isn’t about stripping away until meaning gets lost. It’s about reshaping the story—preserving what matters while making it more accessible for a specific audience.

Pelletier’s spinach analogy made an impression—attendees and presenters alike brought it up repeatedly throughout the conference, and this idea of curation kept coming up in other sessions.

Letting science in through the back door

Once you’ve figured out what to keep in your story, how can you make sure it actually reaches people, especially when the subject is something charged like climate change? In a session on communicating about the climate crisis, writer Jason Pchajek said people will lower their defences when reading fiction. This makes it a powerful medium for exploring emotionally complex issues like climate change.

In science fiction, storytelling can become a kind of translation—not just from technical language into clear language, but from abstract knowledge into a character’s lived experience. Fiction can “let ideas in through the back door,” creating space for reflection where direct messaging might not reach people.

Pchajek sees traditional science communication and science fiction as complementary tools. Together, he believes they can reach audiences in ways that data alone cannot.

Similarly, a presentation on teaching science communication to undergraduate students showed how storytelling can make learning more engaging and effective. Biology professors Dion Durnford and Sarah Hewitt ask their students to write stories about various science topics then compile those to create online student science magazines. Durnford and Hewitt discovered that, when students build narratives around scientific concepts, they engage more fully and think more critically about what they’re learning.

Storytelling can be more than a communication tool—it can also be a learning tool.

Emotion—engaging without overload

Fiction works well for exploring emotionally charged issues because the reader’s emotions are diffused through fictional characters. This buffer is significant.

Jaweria Qaiser warned that there’s a limit to how often we can draw on a reader’s emotions. Her research on emotionally intense science communication—particularly in areas like public health and climate change—examines what happens when audiences are repeatedly exposed to distressing stories. The result, she found, is often emotional overload. When that happens, people disengage and lose trust.

Qaiser offered some practical advice—pace, don’t pile. Rather than layering multiple emotional appeals, communicators should be intentional and specific. She told us to think about what we want our audience to feel, and, more importantly, what we want them to do. Emotion can motivate action, but only when we use it thoughtfully.

Storytelling in a fragmented information landscape

Trust can also erode when the information landscape itself becomes hard to verify. One of the most thought-provoking sessions focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on science communication.

Serena Bianchi explored what happens to writing—and thinking—when we outsource it to generative AI. Writing, she argued, isn’t just a way to communicate, it’s a cognitive process tied to learning, creativity, and understanding.

She referenced a recent MIT Media Lab study that compared three groups of writers: participants who used ChatGPT, those who used a search engine, and those who wrote without help. The ChatGPT group showed less brain engagement while writing, had more difficulty remembering what they had “written,” and felt less ownership over their work than either of the other groups.

This reminded me of one of my favourite quotes from author and historian David McCullough, who said, “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.” [1]

If writing is thinking, what happens when we outsource writing? And what does this mean in science communication, where trust and credibility are so important?

Pouria Nazemi extended this discussion by examining how algorithms, generative AI, and “fragmented media systems” are reshaping public knowledge. He described how our information landscape is fracturing. While we once assumed that we had a shared informational ground—common sources, shared evidence, and broadly similar exposure to media—Nazemi said that assumption is breaking down.

He described a “multiverse of truth,” in which the same scientific story can be amplified, distorted, or made invisible depending on the platform and the audience. In these parallel information environments, verification becomes harder, trust declines, and shared understanding erodes.

Nazemi said the role of science communicators is also changing. It’s no longer enough to explain the science; we also need to rebuild a shared foundation for understanding.

Writing for real people

Several sessions brought the focus back to practice.

Sarah Anderson’s presentation on her work evaluating marine transportation safety reports highlighted the importance of writing for real, diverse audiences. The people who read and use these reports—the people her team call “changemakers”—include everyone, from students and instructors to fishers and First Nations community leaders.

How can you tell if your reports are hitting the mark? Anderson proposed a concept borrowed from software development—user testing. Instead of assuming clarity, you test for it. She suggested having people read the work out loud. Listen to how they interpret it. Observe how they talk to each other about using the document.

From my work in plain language and accessibility, I know these methods reveal gaps that traditional editing often misses. They also reinforce a simple but powerful idea—writing is only effective if it works for the people it’s intended for.

Ray Mahoney’s work with Indigenous communities in Australia also explored the idea that effective communication should be tailored to the needs of your audience. A technical report may work well for researchers, but it won’t work as well when you try to communicate the same findings to the community where you conducted the research. For community members, other formats—social media, community-focused summary reports, or information visuals—may be more appropriate.

While all of these media can communicate a message clearly, the question is which one will be the most relevant. Communication should be shaped by the needs, preferences, and contexts of the audience.

Dawn Henwood reinforced this in her session on trust building. She emphasized that how we communicate is just as important as what we communicate. She described narrative as the combination of events (what happens) and discourse (how the story is told). She said trust is built not only through accurate information, but also through relatability, tone, and the relationship we establish with our audience.

Making numbers human friendly

When you’re telling data stories, trust comes from making the numbers relatable, making insights easy to see, and reducing opportunities for misinterpretation.

Many people find numbers intimidating, which can be a barrier to understanding. However, Renée-Claude Goulet and Michelle Campbell Mekarski showed us some ways to overcome that barrier with better design.

They said the goal when you’re telling a data story is not just to present numbers; you need to make those numbers human friendly. When we make numbers tangible—through clear visuals, context, and narrative—they become far more accessible.

Again, the concept of careful selection emerged. Goulet and Campbell Mekarski reminded us that effective data storytelling is not about showing everything, it’s about finding the key message and building around it.

For me, this session was affirming. I teach workshops and online courses to help people more confidently uncover the story their numbers are trying to tell, and then create clear and effective data visuals to support those stories. Like Goulet and Campbell Mekarski, I teach foundational skills that improve the way people communicate numbers regardless of the software they’re using or the medium they’re communicating in. This session reinforced the value of the work I do.

Going deeper—storytelling and meaning

The closing plenary, a fireside chat with journalist Nahlah Ayed, was one of the highlights of the conference for me.

Ayed talked about her work on Ideas, a program designed to “go deeper” into stories. This kind of depth is increasingly rare in a media environment where we are bombarded with information and there’s always something new to catch our attention. As a regular listener of the show, I would argue that the world needs Ideas now more than ever.

Ayed emphasized the importance of telling human stories, rather than treating people as background material. In science writing, that means treating research as something done by and for people, not just talking about the data. It means writing about who is affected by the science, what they experience, and why the findings matter, instead of stopping at the technical result.

This was one of the sessions I was most looking forward to, and I was not disappointed! As expected, Ayed’s talk was personal and engaging. She was just as interested in hearing from the people in the audience as she was in telling us about herself. She made personal connections with anyone who stood at the microphone and asked a question. She was relatable.

My key takeaways

The most important thing I learned from this conference is that storytelling is not simply an add-on to science communication. It’s the mechanism through which science connects with our readers and becomes useable.

But storytelling also carries responsibility. It demands careful selection, ethical judgment, and an awareness of the audience—clarity without distortion, emotion without overload, and accessibility without loss of meaning. In a world of increasing complexity and increasingly fragmented information, those skills aren’t optional.

Here’s how I’ve started translating that into practice. Before I start writing, I ask myself three questions:

• What is this really about? I don’t mean the topic, but the one idea a reader should walk away with. Everything else gets curated away.
• Who is this for and where will they be using it? The audience shapes the format, the tone, and the level of detail, not the other way around.
• What do I want my reader to feel, and what do I want them to do? Emotion is a tool for action, not an end in itself. And it has a limit.

I came to this conference with an understanding that storytelling matters. I left with a stronger sense of responsibility and a commitment to change a few things in my own writing and teaching. I want to tell better stories and I want to be more deliberate about how I tell them.

[1] This quote appears in the article “The Danger of Historical Amnesia,” a conversation between David McCullough and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Chairman Bruce Cole, published in Humanities, Vol. 23, No. 4 (July/August 2002).