Stories

• don’t start a paper with a story if it doesn’t fit the rest of your style and you never return to it. This can create incorrect expectations of the paper and lead to audience let down.
• If you do begin with a story, be sure it relates to your topic closely. Make sure it communicates important ideas. Just because you fed readers good description doesn’t mean it adds to your purpose.
• [link to some good examples]
• If you use a name like "Johnny" or "Tommy," your story will sound like a cute little thing that you made up. It sounds too much like "See Dick run. See Jane play." This can damage both your credibility and the credibility of your story and paper.
• As a matter of fact, many stories seem cheesy no matter what. One way to use stories without sounding like an elementary reader is to treat them like case studies. In a case study, you can give information about a person’s experience but you make it sound more or less objective. You might use less description. For an excellent example of interesting reading of this kind, read The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks.

One key for effective use of stories is to use the Magic Number 3. Once you’ve used something (like a story) three times, it becomes a pattern. Readers get used to it. It doesn’t stand out and not fit your style.

One excellent use of the Magic Number Three is found in a paper on engineering where the paper opens with a story of a boy who awakes in conditions similar to those of a hundred years ago (cold wood floors, cows to milk, and mom’s making breakfast?!). The author then discusses the importance and role of engineering, and jumps back into a picture of the same boy waking up in a possible future with contaminated outsides (dad rushes him to detox after he opens a window) and Star Trek-like inside conditions. This brings up the idea of the importance of responsibility in our "progress." Finally, the paper closes with the boy waking up in his own bed in our own time.