(The post was first published at Scientific American Blogs.)

Candidate Hillary Clinton’s speeches were less compelling than those of now-President Donald Trump. We all understood this. But I, for one, would stumble over my own words each time I tried to describe what made Trump’s speeches so much more effective.

Fortunately, Randy Olson and Jayde Lovell will tell you what made Trump’s speeches so much more effective without stumbling—and they have summarized the method to make it handy for us scientists. I learned about their approach at their session at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas last month. Their method, called “ABT” for “And, But, Therefore,” forms the basis of Olson’s most recent bookHouston, We Have a Narrative (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

As a candidate, Clinton spoke in lists, as many scientists and other intellectuals do, marshaling a wide range of facts and expressing many angles on each topic. Olson and Lovell would say that Clinton spoke mostly in “ands.” Trump, on the other hand, asserted only his opinions and plans, leaving no room for disagreement. Olson and Lovell would say that Trump speaks in “buts,” each sentence ablaze with narrative.

This claim rang true to me immediately. I think I even feel the word “but” was implied by Trump’s favorite index-finger-in-the-air hand gesture. It reminds me of a similar gesture I taught my kids to use when they need to say something but they have their food in their mouths.

Olson and Lovell go a step further and argue that the ratio of “buts” to “ands” in a speech serves as a useful diagnostic of good narrative. Olson has analyzed many well-known speeches and writings, counted the number of “ands” and counted the number of “buts” in each one. The but-to-and ratio predicts Abraham Lincoln’s victory over Stephen Douglas, he explained. Clinton’s speeches tend to score near 1/5 (one but for every five ands). Trump’s but-to-and ratio generally ranks the highest among all presidents, typically coming in around 1/3.

Indeed, others have pointed to the hazards of overusing the word “and” and the importance of using the word “but” to make communications sound conversational or to appeal to regional crowds. In an attempt to improve the writing style of communications from his institution, the chief economist of the World Bank recently proclaimed that he would not clear a final report for publication if “and” comprised more than 2.6 percent of the text.

Jack Grieve, professor of corpus linguistics at the University of Birmingham, maps the use of words on Twitter to help understand the evolution of language. He pointed out to me that tweets originating in the South tend to use the word “but” more often than tweets coming from elsewhere in the United States.

But this simple index does not impress everyone. Professor Jennifer Mercieca at Texas A&M University, a historian of American political rhetoric, admonished me that Trump tends to fill the pauses with random conjunctions. “I think my rhetorical studies colleagues would feel a little uncomfortable just counting the numbers of  ‘ands’ and ‘buts’ and ‘therefores,’” she said.

But … Olson and Lovell’s ABT method goes beyond “and” and “but.” For maximum power, Olson and Lovell recommend combining “ands,” “buts” and “therefores” into a verbal hat trick, and repeating this verbal pattern over and over to organize your narrative. You might drop the word “therefore” or replace it with the word “so,” for example. But regardless of the exact words chosen, Olson and Lovell argue that the strongest way to make a point takes the form: Agreement (and) Contradiction (but) followed by Consequence (therefore). Here’s an example of the ABT method in an abstract that my student Steven Silverberg recently submitted to the American Astronomical Society:

M dwarfs are critical targets for exoplanet searches, and debris disks often provide key information as to the formation and evolution of planetary systems around higher-mass stars, alongside the planet themselves. But fewer than 300 M dwarf debris disks are known, even though M dwarfs make up 70 percent of the local neighborhood. Therefore, we have undertaken a search for new disk-hosting M dwarfs using the Disk Detective citizen science project….

I added in the word “therefore” for the purpose of this illustration, but it was implied anyway. Here’s another more colloquial example from Oprah Winfrey’s recent Golden Globes speech. Oprah tells you the news and then tells you what had better happen next, spelling it out with an “and”, a “but” and a “so”:

“I’ve interviewed and portrayed people who’ve withstood some of the ugliest things life can throw at you, but the one quality all of them seem to share is an ability to maintain hope for a brighter morning, even during our darkest nights. So I want all the girls watching here, now, to know that a new day is on the horizon!” — Oprah Winfrey, January 7, 2018

On Olson’s blog, you can read a breakdown of Oprah Winfrey’s entire Golden Globes speech, color-coded by element. The speech consists of four cycles of Agreement, Contradiction, Consequence, sometimes literally linked by “and,” “but” and “so” and sometimes not. Olson provides a similar breakdown of Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech.

Although she didn’t trust the but-to-and ratio as a gauge of narrative, Mercieca smiled at the ABT method. “It’s the Hegelian thesis, antithesis, synthesis model,” she explained, referring to a triad often ascribed toGerman philosopher Georg Hegel, and sometimes taught in writing classes. Indeed, Olson refers to Hegel in his blog and his book as the true originator of the ABT concept.

Certainly, there have been times in my writing and speaking when I have instinctively begun blurting out all of the facts I could think of on a topic, to the pain of my audience. Other times, I have written myself into tangles of ”however”s, “yet”s and “while”s. It’s not my fault. As scientists, we are trained to assemble all relevant pieces of evidence, narrative be damned.

But next time this happens, I will recall Olson and Lovell’s (and Hegel’s) wisdom. Because it should be clear to all of us now that when we venture into the public eye, we must hone our storytelling skills if we intend to lead the world to a safer, more scientific place. “People can’t really think without narrative,” Mercecia told me. “Narrative is leadership,” Olson informed us.

So I challenge you: fire up your video recorder or word processor and calculate the but-to-and ratio in your next public communication. If it’s under 1/5, you might want to sign up for one of Olson and Lovell’s Story Circles training courses. If it’s over 1/3, you might be ready to run for office. Let me know how you’re doing @marckuchner (and share your numbers with @ABTagenda, @JaydeLovell, @JWGrieve and @jenmercieca too).

Then go forth and save the world. 

(This article was first published at Discover,  PLOS blogs, and the SciStarter blog,)

Eighty-seven years ago, this week, Clyde Tombaugh was poring over a pair of photographic plates, hoping to change the world.  He was staring hard into an arcane device called a blink comparator, which allowed him to rapidly switch from viewing one image to the next. In those days before computers, that was the best tool he had for finding the faint, moving dot he was seeking, a new planet in our solar system.

When Tombaugh discovered Pluto in those photographic plates on February 18, 1930, the news made headlines all around the globe. “In the little cluster of orbs which scampers across the sidereal abyss under the name of the solar system there are, be it known, nine instead of a mere eight, worlds,” said the New York Times. It was a victory for Tombaugh, and for astronomy.

Artist’s concept of the Planet Nine, cold and massive, orbiting hundreds of times farther from the Sun than Earth. Credit: NASA

Times have changed since that big day. Computers and the internet have changed the way we handle large data sets and interact with one another. Telescopes are bigger, and some fly in space, giving us access to wavelengths of light that astronomers in the 1930s could only dream of seeing one day. Pluto is no longer considered a planet, but a dwarf planet, the king of the Kuiper belt, which is a collection of icy bodies orbiting the sun beyond the orbit of Neptune.

But the quest to understand the outskirts of our solar system has only picked up speed. Now evidence for a new planet in the outer solar system has surfaced, one more distant than Pluto. A pattern in the orbits of Kuiper belt objects points to a large perturber—possibly a new Planet Nine. This hypothesized planet could be as massive as Neptune, or even larger, but it has escaped detection because it is so cold and faint.

Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 shows you animated images of the sky taken at four different times. To participate in the search, click on the moving objects. Credit: Zooniverse

So today we’re announcing a new search for moving objects in the realm beyond Neptune: a citizen science project called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. Hosted by Zooniverse, the project invites you to follow in the bold footsteps of Clyde Tombaugh by combing images from NASA’s WISE telescope to find objects that move, like brown dwarfs and planets. Participants will share the credit for their discoveries in any scientific publications that result from the project.Moreover, images of moving objects from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Explorer (WISE) mission point to a population of ultracool brown dwarfs, or rogue planets, whizzing by the solar system beyond Neptune. Some of these nearby worlds may even lurk between us and the closest known star, Proxima Centari. These brown dwarfs hold keys to understanding how stars and planets form and how planetary atmospheres behave.

You won’t need a blink comparator like Tombaugh’s, just a laptop or cell phone.  You’ll view animated images of the sky, in color, and simply click on interesting candidates when you spot them. You’ll join thousands of other citizen astronomers, whom you can chat with on the “TALK” social network, and a team of astrophysicists from NASA, the American Museum of Natural History, Arizona State University, and the University of California – Berkeley.

When you log into Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, you’ll see images of the sky taken at four different times, one after another, from the WISE telescope. Planet Nine is expected to look like a blue dot, hopping and jumping all the way across the images. Brown dwarfs will be redder, and slower moving. Some moving objects will appear as “dipoles”, pairs of bright and dark images.  You’ll also learn how to search other catalogs to see if someone else has already discovered the object you’ve found– or if you’ve made a new discovery.

Making a big discovery these days still takes hard work. But it can be a lot more fun, thanks to citizen science. Before Tombaugh made his big discovery, Percival Lowell, the astronomer for whom Pluto is named, searched for Pluto for ten years, to no avail. Perhaps if he had help from citizen scientists, he might have lived to see its discovery. He might have made thousands of new friends as well.