You may have heard the saying that authors ought to show rather than tell their audience about their subject.
It’s hard to be sure where this concept actually originated, but the research assistant of our age (Google) suggests it was the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, so we’ll go with that. Chekhov was a physician by trade but a playwright by passion. ("Medicine is my lawful wife", he once wrote, "and literature is my mistress.") Considered by many to be one of the finest writers of his generation, the “show don’t tell” aphorism appears to emerge from a letter he wrote his brother in which he laid out this philosophy:
In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.
In other words, don't tell someone that the moon is shining; show them the shimmering glint of light on broken glass. Lyrical, to be sure, but a simple conceit nonetheless: declare not that a thing is, but, rather, show how it looks, feels, or acts.
That approach can be sharply contrasted with a second famous author’s philosophy: Ernest Hemingway’s “iceberg theory.” Unlike Chekhov, Hemingway’s early days were spent working as a journalist chronically short on time and copy space, which influenced his perspective on the value of omission.
That formative experience guided Hemingway’s later, terser style, summarized in his statement that “The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” In other words, there is something captivating about nibbling around the edges of an idea, while not explicitly revealing its manners or content. In this approach, the reader’s imagination is a powerful tool that does not require painstakingly detailed minutiae.
While Hemingway’s sentiments are perhaps appropriate for the budding fiction author, let us be clear that Hemingway’s approach is terrible advice for the social science researcher.
Social scientists are not mystery writers! We are not hunting for meaning or waxing poetic. There is nothing that we want to leave with the reader’s imagination; our goal is to demystify the relationship between phenomena not playfully omit key details. If something is important, show it.
That doesn’t mean you can’t be stylish. Just write like Chekhov, not Hemingway.
To be clear, you don’t want to have your readers get lost in the details, and you don’t just want to pile on fact atop fact. Rather, you need to make sure that every detail serves a purpose—and particularly that if you’re bringing up a point in an introduction or theory section, that it will pay off in the methods or results section. (Think of this as Chekhov’s gun for academic writing.)
Every semester, we spend a great deal of time asking, sometimes begging, students to elaborate what they’re talking about in their writing. Students sometimes assume that the meaning of a given statement or observation is obvious, even when we can cite plenty of examples about how something that seems obvious turns out to require lots of unpacking—and that the details are where the real story comes through.
Take participating in protests, for example. In their recent book Why Bother? Rethinking Participation in Elections and Protests, Aytaç and Stokes convey that the size of a protest matters for whether people take to the streets. If a student was writing about the predictors of such participation, then they might mention the finding that people are attracted to protest when they see others doing so. But that is only part of the story. Aytaç and Stokes write that this finding is motivated by human psychology, that people are not rational utility maximizers in the classical sense. Ordinary people don’t just look at participation as materially costly, but psychologically costly as well. In other words, there are abstention costs: failing to join your friends in the streets to protest a repressive government carries costs of its own that are borne by non-participants. If all your friends and relatives take to the streets and you do not, then where does that leave you? Would you be content with them bearing the costs of repression or enjoying a hard-won victory without you?
Those are the details that matter! It is not enough to merely mention that protest size predicts participatory intent. Instead, we are searching for you to show us why that matters. That logic applies whether you’re describing turnout, why countries don’t go to war, or how emotions shape electoral choice.
Show the reader the way. Unpack the story for them.
The takeaway: “Showing” means painting a portrait of your subject for the reader rather than simply stating that they exist. It involves density, which has nothing to do with jargon or vernacular more generally. Instead, we want to write with descriptive richness. We want depictions of theory to be detailed, but not so pain-stakingly detailed that the reader loses the forest for the trees.
Don’t mistake volume for richness or details for ornateness. Density involves showing how something works with the appropriate details and in a way that is syntactically concise and direct.
The practical: Show the reader how they can understand your topic. Don’t just tell them about things. Describe relationships, include relevant anecdotal examples, and analyze the mechanics of concepts. Simple summaries with citations often are less desirable than synthesis that shows how research relates to other research.