Many psychologists think the Results section is the driest part of any journal article, that the idea in this portion of the manuscript is simply to present the data and move on. For students reading journal articles as class assignments, the Results section is often the one skipped. It is considered boring at best, inscrutable at worst, and whatever one needs to know is summarized in the opening paragraphs of the Discussion anyway. It does not have to be this way, however. In this chapter, I argue that there are techniques for writing a Results section that at least make it readable, if not thrilling.

The key is to tell a good story. In recent years, the idea that mental representations are organized as stories is quite popular. Jefferson Singer and I argued that the self is a story – that who we are really is a set of stories that we tell about ourselves (Singer & Salovey, 1993). The editor of this volume, Robert Sternberg (1998), has described love as a story. Sternberg maintains that there are various kinds of romantic scripts guiding our conception of how relationships unfold. Robert Abelson (1995) described the way in which investigators make claims with statistical tests as a “principled argument,” that is, a kind of story. Perhaps the boldest idea comes from one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, Roger Schank (1990), who claimed that all of cognition is, essentially, a story.