I have liked stuff for its dialogue or original concept but I have never seen a article where I went "damn thats some fucking bangin clinical tone".
Clinical tone mostly fits the purpose of making the article sound like a corporate/scientific document and keep you immersed in the discussion of the anomaly. It's the same as writing a plot structure, working from exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. It's not too remarkable most time, but is expected. And there are times in which it could be profound.
Dreams. Each man longs to pursue his dream. Each man is tortured by this dream, but the dream gives meaning to his life. Even if the dream ruins his life, man cannot allow himself to leave it behind. In this world, is man ever able to possess anything more solid, than a dream?
~Kentaro Miura
It’s something that goes hand in hand with the premise. There’s not much point to writing from the perspective of a organization centered around detaining and studying anomalies if you’re not gonna be professional about it. I suppose you could call it an immersion thing.
Necropost but:
I believe that clinical tone is integral in forming the horror/creepiness of an RPC article. In other horror mediums, horror writing for example, whoever is describing the monster is (usually) a human being and as such will input their feelings and subjective take on the monster. This usually leads to descriptors like "horrible," "wretched," and all other manner of words that tell you the monster that's being described is dangerous and scary. In doing so, the reader can feel an element of safety in that you're hearing a description of a monster within human terms, and you are also engaging in the primordial story by the campfire, where one human grants knowledge of something dangerous to another while they are under the bubble of safety,1 something we've been doing for god knows how long. All of this is incredibly human in nature, and so the reader can feel comfortable in at least knowing WHO the describer is, what their character is, etc.
RPCs don't grant you this safety. In fact, I would say they forbid it. You are given terms that are unmistakably inhuman, written with zero personal opinion affixed to it, where you don't know a single thing about the describer by design, and your brain (my brain at least) will catch on to that deliberate shadowing of the describer. All of this grants you zero leeway towards the element of safety I described above. You are utterly alone in that you have an image of something terrible and you don't have anyone to confide in the horror of it together, like you would in the aforementioned campfire. To some degree, this is how I believe clinical tone makes an RPC article creepier; it is written in a way that revokes that primordial coping mechanism that allows you to feel any safety by sharing your uneasiness with someone around you.
If you've been reading this type of fiction online for as long as I have, there will likely have been a time where you were so young that it actually genuinely scared you, that these creatures/objects could be real and out there. However, I do recall being in the library with my schoolmates and huddling up together to look at the old computer showing the spooky SCP wiki and reading these objects and commenting on them and theorizing and generally enjoying the collective reading experience. I also recall that doing this with friends is remarkably less scary than doing it alone, and I believe this contributes to my theory.
That is quite the detailed breakdown. Probably also explains the recent rise of analog and EAS stuff too.
also obligatory mucho texto.