Comment by JumpCrisscross
4 years ago
> for a story about how chemical X is bad for your health, you don't need to read about Suzy and Michael, their new house, what they're going to name their baby and how they decided on painting the house in Suzy's grandmother's favorite color... to learn that some paint includes a chemical that is bad for your health.
But the story isn't chemical X is bad for you. It's about how Suzy and Michael, within a specific set of circumstances, had bad things happen after being exposed to chemical X.
Depending on who you are, those details could be important. If chemical X is known to be harmful, it opens up details into how Suzy and Michael got exposed and who exposed them. Is this a local problem or a national one? Are there alternative explanations for the bad things that have nothing to do with chemical X? The human interest details, meanwhile, clue you into socioeconomic and demographic factors which may be at play. (But also may not.)
These sorts of stories are surfacing anecdotes. Hopefully fact-checked anecdotes. But not peer-reviewed papers, either. (All that said, I personally prefer publications that tend towards terseness.)
> But the story isn't chemical X is bad for you. It's about how Suzy and Michael, within a specific set of circumstances, had bad things happen after being exposed to chemical X.
That's a very specific story then, and that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about "eating poison is not good for humans". Suzy and Michael are humans, therefore eating poison is not good for them, but they could be replaced with any other human: they specifically don't add anything to the story. They're an emotional connection for the reader at best and a filler at worst.