Among the traces of the first exam of Maturità 2026, a text taken from the volume by the journalist and science popularizer Piero Bianucci was also released, I’ll tell you in your own words, published in 2007. Bianucci’s work was born as a scientific writing manual, but it also talks about creativity, the ability to observe reality and the way in which great discoveries manage to change our point of view on the world.
According to the journalist, learning to write and talk about science also means learning to communicate any topic better, from history to economics to literature. And writing should not be a tool reserved for a few experts, or a way to show off one’s skills, but rather a tool to make knowledge accessible to everyone, transforming complex information into something capable of moving us.
As editorial director of Geopop, a project born with the ambition of telling as many people as possible about science and culture in an accessible way, it seems right to me to reflect on a topic so important today that it reaches schools and even within a high school leaving exam.
I discovered writing late. I didn’t grow up thinking: “When I grow up I’ll write.” I didn’t experience it, at least at the beginning, as a central tool in my work. Yet today, if I look back, I realize that writing is probably the most important art I have encountered in my journey. Today is my most satisfying creative process: chaos enters, direction comes out. Above all, I realized that writing is the true secret of disclosure.
It is often thought that viral videos work thanks to the visual part: strong images, editing, graphics. All this matters, but behind content that really works there is first of all well-designed writing. A writing that not only serves to transfer information, but to guide attention, generate curiosity and build narrative tension. We don’t stay glued to a video just because it looks good, but because we want to know how it ends.
Writing is not just grammar: it is building a path. It means deciding what to reveal, when to accelerate and how to accompany the viewer towards an answer, making them feel able to make it their own, finally.
Of course, writing is something technical, and has its rules. Robert McKee, master screenwriter, teaches that every story needs a conflict. In popular science, this conflict is rarely a battle between good guys and bad guys. Conflict is the distance between before and after: between what we don’t know and what we will discover, between a mysterious mechanism and its explanation.
It is not enough to explain a concept well or show a beautiful image; you must first create a question and the desire to understand it. True emotion comes from what is behind the image: the ideation, the expectation, the revelation. When the answer comes, something beautiful happens: we feel contentment. Understanding makes us feel good because it takes us on a small journey, from doubt to knowledge.
A good popular story does exactly that: it takes something that seems distant, cold, or technical – like the workings of a dam, the sinking of the Titanic, or the propagation of an earthquake – and turns it into something human. Because science is never just a sequence of data, but is made up of trials, errors and intuitions of people trying to understand the world. Science is full of stories and our job is to find them, along with the right words to convey them.
We live in a world dominated by algorithms, artificial intelligence and fast formats. Technology accelerates processes, but at the basis of a story that works there is a profoundly human ability: choosing a point of view, building meaning and emoting. Not with special effects, but by moving something in the listener, until they say: “Now I understand”.
