THE NARRATIVE KNOCKDOWN: Jeremy Faust, MD (Editor-in-Chief, MedPage) vs Holden Thorp, PhD (Editor-in-Chief, Science Magazine)

Jeremy Faust is our Narrative Hercules. Now it’s time to bring on the contenders. Our first match is with the editor of Science magazine, Holden Thorp.

ABT is Champ!

How much narrative punch are you delivering?

Who draws more on the power of narrative structure? We’ve developed a simple metric for it. You can read about it in detail in Appendix 1 of our new book Lincoln But Trump.

It might feel a little unfair to judge the very people whose job it is to judge others as editors. Whoops, sorry.

The Narrative Index

The Narrative Index is simple as pi:

• NARRATIVE INDEX (NI) = (BUTs / ANDs) x 100

Here is the letter grade curve:

Last week we stumbled across the mind-blowing scores of

Jeremy Faust, MD

. He averaged a 47 for the 25 editorials we analyzed. We’ve looked at several thousand authors over the past decade but have never seen anyone average much over 30 for the NI. It spun our heads around.

But … he’s an editor. Maybe editors just have a brain for narrative structure when they do their own writing. To test this, we calculated the NI for 25 editorials from Holden Thorp, the current editor of Science magazine (Substack:

Holden Thorp, Science EIC

).

Here’s what we found:

Let’s not bicker over who out-argued whom

Dr. Thorp scored a solid “B” for the Narrative Index. Is that a bad score? Not for a scientist. Is it a good score? Is he hoping to reach a very broad audience with his editorials?

To put the scores into the bigger picture, here they are with the values we presented last week.

The Narrative Index for various publications. (Error bars = standard error of the mean, N=25 for each venue.)

Clearly, Dr. Thorp is not arguing with the strength of a NY Times columnist. BUT … NY Times columnists, in turn, don’t come close to arguing with the strength of Dr. Faust.

Next week on The Narrative Knockdown

Tune in next week for The Narrative Knockdown as we search for more contenders to go up against our champ. If you want to learn the details of the Narrative Metrics read our new book Lincoln But Trump. And if you have some thoughts or commentary that you want to share with us directly, we love getting email: randyolsonproductions@gmail.com.