I arrived in North Carolina on Thursday night at around 6 pm. The next morning, I was barely coherent, after an amazing keynote speech, open mic night, and far too late an evening involving ocean bloggers and alcohol. I managed to cup some coffee, then make my way to my first blogging related event of the conference: "Death to Obfuscation: on the use of language in science writing" by none other than the power-packed duet of Ed Yong and Carl Zimmer.
It's hard to walk into a room containing these two brilliant writers and not feel a little self-conscious. They are, in the science blogging community, legends. Not even a distinct lack of sleep and a nagging headache could keep me from focusing every last bit of energy and attention I had on what they had to say - which turned out to be a good thing, because I learned a lot from their workshop.
When I write a scientific proposal, manuscript, or review paper, I am excessively careful in my writing. I outline in advance, lay out topic sentences, gather together my references, and am completely prepared to write before really putting a word down on the page. After I've finished writing, I hack it to pieces, attempting to cut out every last thing that isn't 100% perfect or pertinent. But when I blog, it's the exact opposite. I read a paper. My thoughts start to flow, and I start to write. As I think of connections or related science I google scholar, track down papers, read, and include them in my post. The post evolves constantly, and I go back and add or rearrange paragraphs, until eventually I read through it and am satisfied with my writing or sick enough of it to hit publish.
It had never occurred to me the glaring difference in how I write for these two different mediums until Ed and Carl started talking about careful choice of not only words but sentences, paragraphs, even entire posts. As Carl put it in his pre-workshop post, "Good science writing demands lots of care and inventiveness at all these scales."
In particular, the dynamic duo spoke of "killing your darlings," as in cutting out the one thing you love the most just to see if it is actually important in a post. I don't think I've ever killed a darling in my life.* I like my darlings. They're my darlings, for Pete's sake!
Of course, Ed and Carl have a point. When we grasp tightly to our favorite things, we often lose sight of their actual importance or usefulness. I find that I often write entire posts based on darlings - a sentence or paragraph that forms in my head while I read a paper. From that single moment, I branch backwards and forwards, trying to write a beginning that leads up to it and an end that follows it. But in doing so, do I lose sight of the real meat of my post? Do I fail to elaborate on even more important parts, or totally miss the point? Maybe. At least I should shoot down a few darlings and see what happens - with the wonderful world of computers, I can always put the darling back in if I miss it too much.
Clutching to our dearest sentences, however, isn't the worst offense committed by science writers according to Zimmong (Or should I say Carled?). By far, the most dreadful crime is the use of jargon when trying to appeal to a wide audience. Ed put it perfectly when he said "The biggest mistakes with jargon are using it without realising that not everyone will understand, not caring whether they will, or even expecting them to work hard at understanding you." Carl, of course, has his list of banned words, which I am certain that I have used at least 20% of in blog posts, if not more.
Jargon is exclusionary. It either says "see, I'm smarter than you" or "you're too stupid to read this post - please move on." Either way, you generally fail to captivate the audience you want. Heck, have you read scientific papers? It's often hard to captivate uber nerds with that kind of language!
The goal wasn't to chide: Ed and Carl wanted to remind their audience - scientists and journalists alike - that writing is as much a skill as an art. Words are meant to be meticulously chosen and woven into a piece of writing, not thrown at a page to see what sticks. Sure, I tend to fancy myself a good writer, but I know that I can do a lot better. While I feel my freeform approach to blog writing is part of what makes it so conversational, easy to read, and popular, my blogging would probably improve if I prepared ahead with even a tenth of the effort I do when writing scientifically. And similarly, my grant proposals will be probably be a little more interesting to read if I take off my scientist hat and write like a blogger a little more.
* I just want Ed and Carl to know that in writing this post, I killed my first darling. It was a very hard thing to do. I had this great line about how I would say my research in a scientific context and how I'd say it to a lay person, but it just didn't seem to fit, and I kept moving it around until I realized that that phrase had to be brutally murdered for my post to flow better. I'm still in mourning, even though it was the right thing to do. Feel free to send flowers.
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Will you resurrect your darling for the comment thread? I'd love to see the two versions of your research side-by-side
Nice,
I don't know if Carl and Ed gave the original source for the "kill your darlings" line, it's rather nice (especially in that you should write the line for your own pleasure, then delete it for everyone else's)
"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey itâwhole-heartedly -- and delete it before sending your manuscript to press: Murder your darlings" from Arthur Quiller-Couch
@David - I didn't actually know the original reference, so thanks for that. Geek confession: I first heard the term from Joss Whedon on a commentary on an Angel DVD.
And congrats to Christie on the brutal stabby murder of your first darling. *sniff* They grow up so fast. ;-)
I deleted the original version, but a quickie remake:
To scientist in my field: "I intend to investigate the evolutionary relationships of stonustoxin-like proteins among the Scorpaeniformes using a genomic approach"
To anyone else: "I want to look at the differences in protein toxins in lionfish, stonefish and scorpionfish by taking sequences for already known toxins from stonefish and comparing them to similar sequences in the other kinds of venomous fish"
@Christie: In other words, you want to know how fish can kill, or at least sting like the dickens.
Great post. Keep up the good fight.
My deepest sympathies on the death of your first darling.
I'm a technical writer (high-end engineering analysis software), and I'm sure I'm not the only tech writer addicted to science blogging. But I'm always struck by a) how different scientific, technical, and popular writing are, and b) how alike they are the ways that they are different.
I have a friend who's a highly respected physical chemist, and we were talking writing, so he sent me a pdf of a paper he was particularly proud of. And I was struck by how artificial and formal it was, but it was no less artificial and formal than my best tech writing. It's just that the artifice and conventions used in each case are completely different.
Because the software I write about has the potential to make airplanes fall out of the sky if it's misused, my biggest challenge as a writer is to master the jargon (or as I call it, "gatekeeper vocabulary") to discourage dilettantes from going all GIGO with planes, satellites, and automobiles.
The one thing I've never done is figured out how to write for general audiences, as careful reading of this comment will reveal.
I have been toying with a post for... over a year now, I guess. Now Yong, Zimmer, and you have rendered it obsolete.
I'm an odd bird (or mollusk, as the case may be); I tend to write in verse. Not always, but frequently. And here's the thing: I think everybody should. For reasons much more coherently put in your piece here (and, I assume, by Y & Z, but I was not at the workshop). Writing in verse (or writing poetry, but I don't do that) requires very close attention to each word. It forces, in a way nothing else I have found can do, the examination of what you need to say, how you need to say it, and what you can do without. It reminds you (or me, at least) of the nuances of definitions, of words or phrases, of jargon, of colloquialisms. There are often dozens of ways to say the same thing; at the same time, none of those are exactly the same, and it matters which one you choose.
It is my (thus far untested) belief that this forced care with words generalizes. My prose is much better (present comment excepted) because of my verse.
On the other hand, I do not often follow my own advice. The pressure of a deadline (even self-imposed) is apt to make reflection a rarity, and careful planning impossible. As an example... I am going to ignore everything I just recommended, and post this hastily-written comment.
Christie id love to see your research on this.
I missed the original discussion surrounding this, but I love it. And I have to ask, did anyone mention that (as Roy Blount, Jr. points out in his awesome book Alphabet Juice), the phrase "murder your darlings" is, itself, a darling. It's a beautiful phrase that serves the point being made almost too well; you can practically hear Quiller-Couch chuckling with satisfaction over it.
The point being, that you shouldn't murder every darling. Just most of them.
The version of the phrase/cliche on getting rid of the beloved cuties was "kill your babies." (Heard first from the mouth of a devoutly Catholic editor. Go figure.)
The virtue of that version: ugly, ugly ugly. It tells you how thoroughly you must harden your heart in the service of the greater good of good writing.
Think the Akedah -- and remember that entangled rams are not vouchsafed to the writer all that often.