When the pandemic hit, my husband was bartending. Suddenly out of work, he continued mixing craft cocktails at home. We drank riffs on painkillers and daiquiris with little umbrellas in them in isolation as the ground thawed outside. I felt a bit like Dr. Jacoby, lounging in a Hawaiian shirt before his palm tree wall decal in the moody Pacific Northwest, weeping for his lost Laura.

Something I’ve learned that a cocktail should have one cohesive taste. Drink a fancy cocktail mixed by an unskilled bartender, and you’ll see what I mean. The flavors are all over the place.

Like a poem, a cocktail forms a system where each part is in conversation with the others. People can handle complex flavors if they’re mixed well—if they complement and build on each other. Just look at the popularity of amaros over the past decade.

But mixing an adult drink—not a club drink with liquor and soda splashed in haphazardly—requires skill. Good bartenders don’t eyeball because getting the proportions off by even a little would throw off the flavor.

We’re often presented with the death of nuance, but I believe audiences can handle complexity. Making complexity palatable requires more thought in how a piece is put together. The more complex the material, the more respect required for the ingredients.

Communication about something as complex as science must be both engaging and rigorous, meaning assembled with care based on fact. I’ve lamented before that we often help scientists with the engagement part but leave the rigor part to them. That might work OK for factual rigor, but there’s another form of rigor—narrative rigor—that I believe gets overlooked.

Fruit juice is engaging. Liquor can be challenging. Combining flavors well takes skill. Narrative rigor is the proportions and the way the individual flavor notes complement each other. Is the argument clear? Does the logic flow? Does it build on itself?

This summer, I tried something new and created a short audio course called Narrative System Synthesizer. Narrative rigor and a cohesive system form its backbone. It’s not a step-by-step recipe, but a framework for developing your own narrative.

If you’re a longtime reader of this newsletter, you’ll recognize topics like abstraction, metaphor, and separating information from narrative in their applied form. This is my first time collecting them into a cohesive framework. I’m offering it for an introductory price through Sept. 19, and I hope you’ll check it out because I had a lot of fun building it.

P.S. Speaking of the moody Pacific Northwest, I’ll be attending the National Association of Science Writers conference in Corvallis, OR, later this month. If you’ll be there too, come say hi!

I’m Alex, a science writer and editorial consultant based in Western Massachusetts. I’m fascinated by media theory, complexity science, and communication’s role in scientific progress. Learn more about my work at alexandraataylor.com.