[coastflow]

>"If you can't write about a subject directly, use creative license and make the situation up. Nobody knows / is going to find it different and it will help get your point across."

Making up a situation—without disclosing that it is fiction—is risky in a practical sense and also morally questionable.

Readers typically don't like to be deceived when reading non-fiction. If a specific detail is fabricated and a reader notices, a reader can assume that the writer is sloppy/deceptive, and become far more skeptical with the rest of the author's works. Undisclosed fabrication can also lead to unsound conclusions (for example, an article could rely on the existence of a counter-example to disprove a rule, but a fabricated counter-example would make the argument fail to be valid).

Furthermore, suppose a reader cites an article with a fabricated story, relying on that story to make a point. If the story is false, the reader would take a reputational hit as well. In a moral sense, it's better for the reader to avoid fabricating situations.

It is typically good practice to make an article introduction easy-to-understand with minimal jargon, but creative license should always be disclosed when writing about a hypothetical situation. It leads to higher-quality reasoning (by avoiding arguments that rely on false anecdotal evidence) and is simple to disclose (e.g. "Consider a hypothetical: ...").

[aunty_helen]

They’re called business fables, five dysfunctions of a team being a classic, well known, best selling one. It’s a common way of conveying information that might come from several related experiences and built on to drive home meaning.

People don’t like to be deceived to the point they’ll go out of their way to believe a story is true until presented with unrefutable evidence that it’s false. Even then they’ll prefer to believe the original lie. This is called the backfire effect.

[throwaway290]

You wrote four paragraphs assuming your parent comment urged authors to pass fiction for facts. There are tons of stylistic choices (using names like Bob and Alice, etc.) that make it clear when something is meant as an illustrative example. Let's not cancel the metaphor.

That aside, I'd be very concerned if someone took everything they read as truth unless declared otherwise. I think the overwhelmingly common behavior is to explicitly mark a real story, not the opposite.