Gayety for the Laity: The Art of Writing About Science for Non-Specialists

Abstract:

Anyone who writes scientific papers spends a great deal of blood, sweat, and sometimes tears learning the basics of writing for one’s peers. The emphasis is on clarity of grammar, sentence structure, and definition of terms; presenting material in a logical order; providing sufficient detail that methods can be clearly understood and reproduced; and supporting interpretations and inferences. All of those qualities are also important in writing for readers who are not specialists in the author’s area of expertise. However, most non-specialist readers also expect to be entertained as well as informed. Entertainment here is not meant in a derogatory sense. Rather, the information you are conveying will be much more effective if presented in a lively, evocative style that is rich in metaphor, analogy, and the unexpected (but appropriate) word choice that makes the reader metamorphically sit up and take notice. Scientists learn to write concisely and precisely by using terms that are common but specific to their discipline. These terms become jargon to readers outside of the discipline and one of the challenges of writing for non-specialists is to gracefully explain in a phrase or sentence a concept that you could easily fit it into one technical word. Scientists are also taught to – as one of my mentors once explained it – tell them what you’re going to tell them (abstract, introduction), tell them (methods, results, discussion), then tell them what you told them (conclusions). This approach does not work well for non-specialists, who tend to accuse the writer of repetition. Instead, the scientist can tell a story. My first submission to a peer-reviewed journal came back with a reviewer’s comment that the conclusions appeared like a rabbit out of a hat. That was a humiliating but useful lesson, but the surprise of a rabbit coming out of a hat is perfectly acceptable in writing for non-specialists. Finally, giving the reader a reason to care about the story you’re telling is critical. When writing about my river research, I’ve found that anything dealing with beavers gets far more attention than other topics, so I think of beavers as my charismatic hook for the reader.