Writing Principles

# Citations

Full verifiable source list for claims in this skill. Citations are real: where a claim has contested replication status, the entry says so.

## Reader psychology: the four reward channels

**Transportation / absorption**
- van Laer, de Ruyter, Visconti, Wetzels (2014). "The Extended Transportation-Imagery Model: A Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers' Narrative Transportation." *Journal of Consumer Research*. [doi:10.1086/673383](https://doi.org/10.1086/673383). Meta-analysis of 132 effect sizes establishing transportation as a measurable construct.

**Reading flow**
- Thissen, Menninghaus, Schlotz (2018). "Measuring optimal reading experiences: The reading flow short scale." *Frontiers in Psychology*. [doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02542](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02542). Establishes reading flow as distinct from absorption, with an inverted-U challenge-fit relationship to reading pleasure.

**Social cognition and fiction**
- Dodell-Feder, Tamir (2018). "Fiction reading has a small positive impact on social cognition: A meta-analysis." *Journal of Experimental Psychology: General*. [doi:10.1037/xge0000395](https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000395). Small positive effect; social simulation is a real engagement mechanism.
- Panero et al. (2016). "Does reading a single passage of literary fiction really improve theory of mind? An attempt at replication." *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*. [pubmed 27642659](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27642659/). Failed preregistered replication of the Kidd & Castano effect.
- Kidd & Castano (2018/2019) replication studies. [doi:10.1177/1948550618775410](https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550618775410). The original authors' own replication attempts.

**Aesthetic response and literariness**
- Wimmer, Lüdtke, Jacobs (2023). Studies on narrativity, literariness, and aesthetic response.
- van Peer, Hakemulder, Zyngier (2007). Work on foregrounding and stylistic attention.
- Hartung, Withers, Hagoort, Willems (2021). Style and suspense rely on different processing routes.

**Fiction vs factual framing**
- Hartung, Withers, Hagoort, Willems (2017). Same short story labeled fictional vs factual: no meaningful difference in immersion, appreciation, or reading time. [pubmed 28983269](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28983269/). Fiction works because the reader adopts a simulation stance, not because the text disclaims factuality.

## NLP: documented AI writing failure modes

- Shaib, Barrow, Sun, Nenkova, Xu, Stern, Wallace (2024). "Detection and Measurement of Syntactic Templates in Generated Text." EMNLP 2024. [aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.368](https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.368/). Syntactic templates are copied from pretraining data and are not overwritten by fine-tuning or alignment.
- "The Price of Format: Diversity Collapse in LLMs." Findings of EMNLP 2025. [aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.836](https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.836/). Chat templates themselves suppress topical and semantic diversity on creative tasks, independent of content; prompt-side "be creative" instructions do not close the gap.
- "Creativity Has Left the Chat: The Price of Debiasing Language Models." [arxiv 2406.05587](https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05587). RLHF-aligned models show lower token entropy and attractor-state behavior.
- "LLMs Exhibit Significantly Lower Uncertainty in Creative Writing Than Professional Writers." [arxiv 2602.16162](https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16162). Instruction-tuned and reasoning models have lower token-level uncertainty than base models and than human professional writers, with a larger gap in creative writing than in functional domains.
- "Creating Suspenseful Stories: Iterative Planning with Large Language Models." EACL 2024. [aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.147](https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.147/). LLMs are unreliable for suspenseful story generation; iterative planning improves it.
- "Lost in Stories: Consisten