Nell Lake

This is a good one for the religion file. It’s a big quote-heavy, narratively speaking, but the voice is quietly companionable, intelligent, sympathetic but detached—a good narrative voice. Writing for…

We liked Pierce’s breezy, almost jazzy tone in this piece, the ways she reaches out to her readers. We found some language a bit hard to follow, but overall enjoyed…

This piece is one in a series of stories Nijhuis wrote for the High Country News that uses narrative techniques to get at the complicated issue of climate change. This…

This is travel writing brought to science. Nijhuis joins a group of scientists and students at a camp on a glacier. She’s a seasoned writer on the environment; her pieces…

This is another narative-as-scientific-mystery by Tennant, in which she creates suspense by drawing us into the lives of early settlers, raising a question and proceeding—with strong voice and narrative structure—to…

This piece was part of a package that won a 2005 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting. Cook uses narrative in this piece to show the “real people” who could be…

This is an excerpt from “The Guinea Pig Doctors,” a book by Jon Franklin and John Sutherland about eight doctors who experimented on themselves in pursuit of knowledge. In this…

A model of clear explication of complex ideas, this piece shows how a sense of arc and suspense can be achieved in the form of amiable-narrator-in-pursuit-of-ideas. Swidey begins the piece…

In this dense but accessible piece, Cook creates suspense by pursuing an intellectual mystery, a compelling question. He follows a group of scholars in their effort to figure out whether…

In this piece, we liked Aschwanden’s mix of folksy language and humor with serious explication of scientific debate. She very clearly gets at what’s at stake in the story; we…