Writing Science: Poetic Movements

Paul Dirac (Nobel Prize in physics, 1933) once said: "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."

Is it? Can or should poetry and science mix? Should we teach scientists how to write poetry as a matter of course?




Writing Prompt
Using 2 to 5 words from the list write a poem. Stuck for form? Try haiku.
(5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables)

protein, atom, diffuse, drosophila, phylum, differential, set, scalar, momentum, graphite, ionized, equilibrium, eutrophic, entropy, catalyst, precipitate

Reading
When Science and Poetry Were Friends, an essay by Freeman Dyson
The Future of Science is Art, Jonah Lehrer, Seed Magazine
Roald Hoffman (Bio here) Individual poems here.
Sabrina Vourvoulais Fata Morgana
Karl Kirchewey, Propofol
J.C. Todd, Instant of Turbulence and Endless Caverns, in What Space This Body

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Photo is from surrealmuse, used under a Creative Commons license.

Scientists should blog about their pets

My latest Thesis column is out in March's Nature Chemisty: Blogging on the sidelines (subscription needed). In part a response to Royce Murray's editorial in Analytical Chemistry last fall, the column considers what the role of blogging critically about the primary literature might be. Does blogging by scientists about science help researches? My short answer is yes, it's an effective post-publication filter, a niche that has been filled at other times in other ways.

But I also think that scientists writing about life in the lab or their pets or commute has a role to play in making better science. That wouldn't fit in the column, so the delightful editors at Nature Chem have posted it on their blog.

Writing Science: Fact in Fiction

Can you communicate science via fiction? What are the risks? the benefits? Are there signals in a fiction piece that mixes fact and fiction that help you sort? Should there be?

Writing Prompt
Write a (very) short story using the following three words: planet, curry, madman. Don't like these words? Generate a set using a random word generator.

Reading

• "A Little Heart" Baruch, Jay. Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers. Kent State University Press, 2007.
• "Dissections" Baruch, Jay. Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers. Kent State University Press, 2007.
• Rothman, Claire Holden. The Heart Specialist. Cormorant Books, 2009. Ch. 13
• "Carbon: Part One" by Justina Robson and Andrew Bleloch in Ryman, Geoff. When It Changed: 'Real Science' Science Fiction. Comma Press, 2010
• "Moss Witch" by Sara Maitland and Jennifer Rowntree in Ryman, Geoff. When It Changed: 'Real Science' Science Fiction. Comma Press, 2010
• "Without a Shell" by Adam Marek and Vinod Dhanak in Ryman, Geoff. When It Changed: 'Real Science' Science Fiction. Comma Press, 2010
• “A History Lesson” Robert Scherrer, Nature, 469, 574 (2011).
• “A Question of Breeding” Jeff Hecht, Nature, 453, 562 (2008).
• “All of Me” Ed Rybicki, Nature, 454, 1028 (2008).
• “The Last Laboratory” John Gilbey, Nature, 469, 126 (2011).

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Photo is from Wikimedia.

Writing Science: Gee-Whiz

How do great science writers engage their readers? How do they get into - and out of - a piece?

Writing Prompt
The article is titled "The Case of the Orange Flake". Start writing it. Five minutes.

Read

• "Writing Well About Science" in Blum, Deborah, Mary Knudson, and Robin Marantz Henig. A Field Guide for Science Writers: The Official Guide of the National Association of Science Writers. Oxford University Press, USA, 2005. pp 26-33

Read at least one from A and at least one from B

A

• "Narrative Writing" in Blum, Deborah, Mary Knudson, and Robin
  Marantz Henig. A Field Guide for Science Writers: The Official Guide of
  the National Association of Science Writers. Oxford University Press,
  USA, 2005. pp 138-144
• "Gee Whiz Science Writing" in Blum, Deborah, Mary Knudson, and Robin
  Marantz Henig. A Field Guide for Science Writers: The Official Guide of
  the National Association of Science Writers. Oxford University Press,
  USA, 2005. pp 126-130
• "The Science Essay" in Blum, Deborah, Mary Knudson, and Robin
  Marantz Henig. A Field Guide for Science Writers: The Official Guide of
  the National Association of Science Writers. Oxford University Press,
  USA, 2005. pp 145-150

B

• "Withering Heights: Bailing out from Space," in Roach, Mary. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. pp 247-264
• "Of lice and men: An itchy history" Emily Willingham, SciAm blog
• "The Case of the Wide-Eyed Boy," in Edlow, Jonathan A. The Deadly Dinner Party: and Other Medical Detective Stories. Yale University Press, 2009. pp 116-128
• "Radium (Ra) 1928-29," in Blum, Deborah. The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. Penguin (Non-Classics), 2011. pp 176-195
• "The Case of the Red Leg," in Gawande, Atul. Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science. Metropolitan Books, 2002. pp 228-252

Writing assignment
Write your own version of "The Itch" (but not about itching), a 300-400 piece on the science of some common experience, using a strong narrative.

Writing Science: Science-speak - jargon or dialect?

How good is your ear? How does scientific language play in a piece written for a broad popular audience?

Writing prompt
You are headed for Mars, you may take 2 kg (not quite 4 and a half pounds) of personal gear. What would you take and why? Bear in mind that you will have varying gravity conditions during the trip. What could you not bear to run out of?

Reading

• "Avoid Fancy Words" in Strunk, William, and E.B. White. The Elements of Style Illustrated. Penguin (Non-Classics), 2007. pp 111-113
• "Do not use dialect unless your ear is good" in Strunk, William, and E.B. White. The Elements of Style Illustrated. Penguin (Non-Classics), 2007. pp 113
• "Avoid Foreign Languages" in Strunk, William, and E.B. White. The Elements of Style Illustrated. Penguin (Non-Classics), 2007. pp 115
• Carl Zimmer's list of words that should be banned from science writing (H/T ejwillingham)
  

Writing Science: Itchy Writing

We're moving onto looking at science journalism.

Writing out of the lab - how well does translation work between the scholarly scientific literature and the newspaper or magazine? What is most likely to get lost? What gets added? Should popular science writers be/have been scientists? Should scientists have editorial control over articles written about their work? Should there be (are there) ethical rules for how science can be popularized?

Questions on the table How does the narrative work in that piece versus the shorter pieces? How is scientific language deployed? is it decorative or iconic or instructive? The titles? What did they promise versus deliver?

Several of my students began Atul Gawande's piece thinking it was fiction - what are the clues that suggest this is science reporting embedded in a riveting narrative? Several others had read it almost three years ago (when it appeared in June of 2008) and still remembered the article (as did I!) - what is so compelling about The Itch?


Read

• "The Itch" Atul Gawande, The New Yorker
• Urrrrr - it itches, Michelle Francl, The Culture of Chemistry
• Agonists and Allergies, Michelle Francl, The Culture of Chemistry

Writing prompt
Write about a time you itched. The itch could be literal or metaphorical. Five minutes.

Up next? Do not use dialect unless your ear is good

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"Clipping" was generated by fodey.com from this blog post: Sex and the scientist

Writing Science: The Short and Sweet of It, Titles and Tweets

We're thinking about writing short bits of science with style and precision: titles and tweets, abstracts and blog posts.

What makes a great title? One theory (here) suggests great book titles should be PINC ("pink"): make a promise, create intrigue, identify a need, and/or describe content.

Are there other things that titles should do in a science piece (be it blog post, tweet or scholarly article)? How would you prioritize these for different audiences, different genres?

Should an abstract tease? Is there a place for wit in the formal scientific literature? When? How? Who? Is it OK for someone of Paul Wender's stature to indulge?

Readings

• "Wit" and "Abstracts" Pierre Laszlo, Communicating Science: A practical guide. Springer 2006. p 56, p. 2
• The art(?) of scientific abstract writing From In the pipeline, Derek Lowe
• Four strategies for creating snappy titles. Michael Hyatt
• Writing a scientific paper, From Research to Manuscript: a guide to scientific writing, Michael Jay Katz, Springer, 2006. pp 113-114
• Referee's quotes, Environmental Microbiology (2010) 12(12), 3303–3304

Writing assignment #3
Write 5 tweets pointing colleagues to recent articles in the field (give me title/ref for the article); In 50-100 words comment on the construction of your tweet in light of the criteria you have developed for a good science tweet.

Writing Prompt for the day
Write a series of possible titles for the abstracts below. When you get stuck, move to the next abstract! Five minutes. (Click on the links to see the title the authors chose.)

A. Human infants face the formidable challenge of learning the structure of their social environment. Previous research indicates that infants have early-developing representations of intentional agents, and of cooperative social interactions, that help meet that challenge. Here we report five studies with 144 infant participants showing that 10- to 13-month-old, but not 8-month-old, infants recognize when two novel agents have conflicting goals, and that they use the agents’ relative size to predict the outcome of the very first dominance contests between them. These results suggest that preverbal infants mentally represent social dominance and use a cue that covaries with it phylogenetically, and marks it metaphorically across human cultures and languages, to predict which of two agents is likely to prevail in a conflict of goals. Science 331, 477-480 (2011)

B. The effect of environmental change on ecosystems is mediated by species interactions. Environmental change may remove or add species and shift life-history events, altering which species interact at a given time. However, environmental change may also reconfigure multispecies interactions when both species composition and phenology remain intact. In a Caribbean island system, a major manifestation of environmental change is seaweed deposition, which has been linked to eutrophication, overfishing, and hurricanes. Here, we show in a whole-island field experiment that without seaweed two predators—lizards and ants—had a substantially greater-than-additive effect on herbivory. When seaweed was added to mimic deposition by hurricanes, no interactive predator effect occurred. Thus environmental change can substantially restructure food-web interactions, complicating efforts to predict anthropogenic changes in ecosystem processes. Science 331, 461-463 (2011)