Science Writing
drorzel | February 4, 2013I ended up feeling that my most valuable contribution to the Science Online meeting (other than boosting the income of the Marriott's bartenders) was providing experienced commentary and advice from a slightly different angle than a lot of the other participants. A bunch of this got tweeted out by other people in the sessions, but the format (both at the conference and on Twitter) necessarily strips a lot of nuance out of what I was trying to say (and not always saying successfully). so I thought I'd revise and expand on my remarks a little bit. In particular, I want to post expanded versions…
esiegel | September 30, 2012“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” -Rudyard Kipling
You might not believe it, but when I was a kid, I hated writing. Absolutely hated it. And it wasn't because I didn't have anything to write, or because I didn't enjoy communicating my thoughts, or because I didn't like the written word, because I always enjoyed reading. Perhaps because I was a lefty with bad handwriting, I felt that the entire enterprise of writing was against me.
Image credit: samarth over at MemeCenter.
Of course, that was my issue to work through, and not only do I write all…
milhayser | June 8, 2012On EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse says his new book Among the Creationists: Dispatches From the Anti-Evolutionist Frontline is now available with turnable pages and a hardcover binding. Rosenhouse calls the book "a collection of stories and anecdotes from my experiences attending creationist conferences over the last ten years" as well as an exploration of religious and scientific viewpoints. Electronic versions of the book were released in February. On Uncertain Principles, author Chad Orzel reflects on the anti-trust suit filed by the US Department of Justice against major ebook publishers…
drorzel | May 17, 2012This has been out for a little while now, and Chris has been promoting it very heavily, and it's sort of interesting to see the reactions. It's really something of a Rorschach blot of a book, with a lot of what's been written about it telling you more about what the writer wants to be in the book than what's actually in it. A lot of conservative responses to it are basically case studies in the sort of motivated reasoning Chris is writing about, but I've even seen some liberals jumping on it as completely confirming their own pre-existing biases, for example, claiming that this means Chris…
drorzel | May 10, 2012There's been a bunch of discussion recently about philosophy of science and whether it adds anything to science. Most of this was prompted by Lawrence Krauss's decision to become the Nth case study for "Why authors should never respond directly to bad reviews," with some snide comments in an interview in response to a negative review of his latest book. Sean Carroll does an admirable job of being the voice of reason, and summarizes most of the important contributions to that point. Some of the more recent entries to cross my RSS reader include two each from 13.7 blog and APS's Physics Buzz.
I…
drorzel | March 31, 2012Here are some excerpts from the introductory sections of the very first drafts of some book chapters:
[BLAH, BLAH, BLAHBITTY BLAH]
and
[Introductory blather goes here]
and
Blah, blah, stuff, blather.
There's a good reason for this, based on the basics of scientific writing, namely that the Introduction should give the reader a rough guide to the complete work-- exactly what you're going to say, before you go on and say it. In order to do a good job with the Introduction, you need to have a very solid idea of the shape of the finished product, and exactly what you need to mention up front…
kbonham | February 27, 2012If you've been reading science blogs for a while, you probably know about Open Laboratory. It's a yearly anthology of the best science blog writing on the internet. And the submission form is now open (there's a handy little badge in the left sidebar too).
If you appreciate the stuff that I do here, please consider submitting the posts to Open Labs. With so many amazing science bloggers out there, I doubt I'll make it very far, but I've decided to put this out there because I think it will help me strive to work harder. When blogging has to compete with my work at the bench, and with…
drorzel | February 14, 2012As I've said a bazillion times already this term, I'm teaching a class that is about research and writing, with a big final paper due at the end of the term. Because iterative feedback is key to learning to write, they also have to turn in a complete rough draft, which I will mark up and have them revise.
One of the many, many problems with teaching writing is that too many students regard the writing of drafts as pointless busy-work. Others have no real concept of what a rough draft is-- when I've collected drafts in the past, I often get things that would barely qualify as an outline, let…
kcollins | May 16, 2011Nifty Fifty Speaker Carl Zimmer is often called one of the nation's most astute, informed and lyrical science writers. Specializing in communicating about the wonders and mysteries of evolution, biology and neuroscience, Carl Zimmer - in such books as The Tangled Bank, Parasite Rex, and Soul Made Flesh - writes with such grace, skill and clarity that he makes even difficult subjects like natural selection and the brain understandable and exciting to readers who have little formal education in science.
"I like to write books about subjects that greatly intrigue me --subjects that I want to…
drorzel | May 10, 2011When I was looking over the Great Discoveries series titles for writing yesterday's Quantum Man review, I was struck again by how the Rutherford biography by Richard Reeves is an oddity. Not only is Rutherford a relatively happy fellow-- the book is really lacking in the salacious gossip that is usually a staple of biography, probably because Rutherford was happily married for umpteen years-- but he's an experimentalist, and you don't see that many high-profile biographies of experimental physicists.
When you run down the list of famous and relatively modern scientists who have books written…
drorzel | May 5, 2011An academic email list that I'm on has started a discussion of lab writing, pointing out that students in some lab classes spend more time on writing lab reports in a quasi-journal-article format format than they do taking and analyzing data. This "feels " wrong in many ways, and the person who kicked off the discussion did so by asking for alternatives to the journal-article style lab report.
This is a recurring discussion in physics education, because everybody who teaches lab courses struggles with this issue (guess what I'm procrastinating from grading right now...). It's made much worse…
milhayser | April 11, 2011
On Confessions of a Science Librarian, John Dupuis considers the keys to writing a successful science book, such as The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Most important, says John, is crossover appeal: "normally picky reviewers loved TILoHL because it's more than 'just' a science book. They saw it as a book that's also about people and society and ethics." John has a list of specific strategies to make a book appeal to a broader audience. Meanwhile, Chad Orzel offers insight into the writing process behind the sequel to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, a popular science book from 2009…
drorzel | January 11, 2011It occurs to me that I'm kind of dropping the ball on my shameless self-promotion because I haven't mentioned that one of my posts made the cut for this year's fifth edition of the best-of-science-blogging anthology The Open Laboratory. The post included is Science Is More Like Sumo Than Soccer, a discussion of the importance of avoiding jargon.
I was a little surprised at that one, but re-reading it to copyedit the text for publication, I guess it is pretty good. It wasn't one of the top posts of last year, traffic-wise, but I think it's useful, and am happy to have it included.
(It's…
drorzel | December 2, 2010The poor coverage of science in the media is an evergreen topic in blogdom, to the point where I've mostly stopped clicking on links to those sorts of pieces. This ScienceProgress post about newsroom culture bugged me, though, and it took me a while to figure out the problem. The author worked as a reporter in North Carolina over the summer, covering science topics, and writes about his dissatisfaction with the journalistic template:
I had one editor who required that I give him my story pitches using six words or fewer. But the message wasn't even simply to shorten; it was to make it punchy…
drorzel | November 6, 2010Having written in defense of analogies in physics yesterday, I should note that not all of the analogies that are brought out in an attempt to clarify physics concepts are good. For example, there's this incredibly strained opening to a Science News article on entanglement:
If the Manning brothers were quantum physicists as well as NFL quarterbacks, one of them could win his game's opening coin toss every time. The night before they played, the brothers would take two coins from a special quantum box to use the next day. If Peyton's game came first, after learning the outcome of his coin toss…
drorzel | November 3, 2010I have nothing useful or interesting to say about electoral politics, but I suspect that's all people will want to read about today. So here's a book post that's been backlogged for quite a while.
Lisa Randall's Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions dates from 2005, and was, I think, part of the huge spate of string-theory-related books at that time (just before the String Theory Backlash books of 2006). It includes the usual survey of the Standard Model and the problems thereof, with an emphasis on the sort of extra-dimension theories that Randall and…
pronald | August 1, 2010Ed Yong recently published a post called "On the origin of science writers" asking that science writers (anyone who regularly writes about science) tell the story of how they got started. The idea is to establish a resource for future writers. I joined the thread and have reprinted it here.
As far back as I can remember I loved to read and I loved the wilderness. In fact my favorite times were reading in the wilderness, preferably in a tree near our mountain cabin, high enough where my brothers could not reach me with stones or snowballs.
I did not think much about being a writer myself until…
rskloot | July 2, 2010
I've been working for a while to develop a Frequently Asked Questions page to answers the most common reader questions about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Well, it's now online, and it addresses questions ranging from why HeLa cells are immortal to how the Lacks family is benefiting from the book. It also includes answers to commonly asked publishing questions, like, How do I break into science writing? You can read it online here. If you have burning questions not answered there, leave them in the comments section below -- I'll add to the FAQ as questions arise and time allows.
drorzel | June 20, 2010There's a blog post making the rounds of the science blogosphere titled If Sports Got Reported Like Science, which imagines the effect of applying the perceived restriction on scientific terminology to sports reporting:
HOST: In sports news, Chelsea manager Carlo Ancelotti today heavily criticised a controversial offside decision which denied Didier Drogba a late equaliser, leaving Chelsea with a 1-all draw against Sunderland.
INTERCOM: Wait. Hold it. What was all that sports jargon?
HOST: It's just what's in the script. All I did was read it - I've got no idea what it's really on about.…
rskloot | May 13, 2010Things have been a bit quiet here as I finished up my crazy
four-month-long book tour, and there's much to catch up on. First, some big news just in: Oprah,
Alan Ball, and HBO are going to be making a movie version of my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This news has gotten quite a bit of
coverage on Twitter and elsewhere, with me fielding questions about the movie,
and various folks voting on who should play which character in the film (not
that I have any control over such things, but it's still fun to think about).
The combination of Oprah, Alan Ball, and HBO is nothing…