Writing Science: The End

My quarter long science writing course came to a close last Friday. We test-drove one of the methods sections students wrote early on (how to make the perfect cup of hot chocolate, rather than coffee), ate pastries from the wonderful shop down the street and read from favorite works we'd written or read as part of the course. It was a lovely way to bring things to an end.

The final "writing" prompt
Bring a selection (roughly 200 to 300 words in length) from a piece you wrote that you'd like to read or a piece you read during the course that you'd like to share.

Thanks, too, to everyone who followed along, and especially those who shared, here (in the comments) and there.

Reading
I had more on my list of things to read than we could possibly get to -- if anyone would like the full reading list, send me a note and I'd be happy to share.

Final writing assignment
Write an 'In Your Element'-style essay for Nature Chemistry's science writing contest on any one of the following elements — helium, nitrogen, sodium, copper, bromine, indium or plutonium. 700-800 -words. All the details are here. Deadline is August 1, 2011.

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Illustration is from Wikimedia commons.

Writing Science: Punch Lines

"When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth." George Bernard Shaw

How seriously should we take science? Is science inherently funny - are those odd spots where truth is hidden? Can science be humorous without being a caricature? Do you have to be a scientist to get the joke? What role might humor play in teaching science? And for that matter, why are words with a hard c sound (like cryogenic) funny?



Readings

Brian Malow - superb stand up science comedy
The Big Blog Theory - the science behind the humor on The Big Bang Theory

Periodic table humor.

XKCD a comic strip which carries the warning: "this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)." And apparently unsuitable for high school students, it's blocked as "adult content" where I'm on the web. I'm in the high school nominally supervising the theater tech crew as they construct a set. Don't ask about the decibel level!)

Men of Mystery (subscription only) Taking on the stereotypes of science: why are scientists drawn as guys in white coats with bad hair? M.M Francl, Nature Chemistry, 2, 68-70 (2010).

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.

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)

Writing Science: What do journal articles and romance novels have in common?

The anatomy of a scientific paper. What do scientists mean when we say "the literature" (in hushed reverent tones)? What role does it play? Is a journal article as formulaic as a romance novel? Is this a bad thing? Where is the drama packed into a scientific paper? The introduction? The conclusion? Or are articles (as one of my students put it) "stripped of all their drama"?

Writing prompt of the day

Pick one of the titles below and write an introduction to this paper. If you don't know the meaning of a particular term, create a meaning. Five minutes.

• Kinetic Isotope Effects for the Reactions of Muonic Helium and Muonium with H2
• Enhanced lithium depletion in Sun-like stars with orbiting planets
• One small step for a mouse
• Transient Hoogsteen base pairs in canonical duplex DNA

Next up?

What sets the tone in an article? Grab a journal article at random and start circling all the qualifiers - are they "needless words" (as William Strunk of Elements of Style fame would have it) or careful bounding on the part of the authors as to their claim?

And would a set of journal covers look as similar to an untutored eye as these romance novel covers?

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Romance novel covers art from http://www.flickr.com/photos/wackystuff/2551278302/

Writing Science: The. Article.

Yes, the is an article, but "the article" is considered by many to be the best, the most important, the only way to communicate about science (at least to other scientists). Yes? No?

Who should be writing about science? What kinds of writing about science constitute scientific communication? Who should be writing them?

Writing prompt
"All I want is a proper cup of coffee, made in a proper copper coffee pot." —Trout Fishing in America

Describe how your perfect cup of coffee is made. Start where you wish - with the beans, or with pouring it from a pot, or buying it at a cafe. Be specific and detailed. Don't drink coffee? (I don't!) Do the same with tea or hot chocolate or a favorite sandwich. Five minutes.

Alternate:
Pick a routine prep you do in lab. Describe the perfect process. Be specific and detailed. Five minutes.

Next up
The anatomy of a scientific paper: what does one of those all important journal articles look like?

What we're reading

• Anatomy of a Scientific Paper, Excerpted from Anatomy of a Scientific Paper
  
• Abstract, Communicating Science: A practical guide, Pierre Laszlo, Springer, 2010.
• How to write a scientific paper (book review), R.W. Guillery, J. Anat. (2008) 213, 629–630.
• Whitesides' Group: writing a paper, George Whitesides, Adv. Mater. 2004, 16, 1375-1377.
• Writing Summaries and Abstracts, Margot Northey & Judi Jewinski, Making Sense: A student's guide to research and writing, Oxford 2009. pp 31-38
• Writing a scientific paper, From Research to Manuscript: a guide to scientific writing, Michael Jay Katz, Springer, 2006. pp 53-124
• Instructions for authors, Journal of the American Chemical Society

ADDENDUM: A chemist muses about coffee here....

Writing Science: Material Science

Writing prompt Day 3: Pen or pencil? What is your preferred tool for writing by hand? Why? Describe your ideal pen or pencil, weight, ink, color, thickness, material. Expound on your preferences - why is a blue ballpoint infinitely preferable to a black marker? Five minutes.

On the table today: reading field notes

Next class: What is science writing? Who does it?

Readings for next time:

Science Blogs and Caveat Emptor, Royce Murray
Table of Contents, Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing
What is the primary literature? from Oberlin College Library

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Photo is from http://www.flickr.com/photos/angelocesare/304107607/ used under a Creative Commons license.

Writing Science: Objectivity

Writing prompt Day 2
Pick one of the objects on the table and write a detailed description of it. You may handle the pieces. If you know the generally accepted name of the object, do not use it in your description. Either way, make up a name for the object.












Assorted questions on the table

• What sorts of editing happen as notes get written? (Everything from the decision to pick up a pen or not -- if it means stripping off your gloves, or mucking up a pen, reliance on memory, distractions of running experimental work, your perspective/focus came up.)
• David Everett suggests exercises for finding your voice - do real writers do things like this? Natalie Goldberg suggests writing without stopping for a set period. (Do real writers 'practice'? How? Why? What might you get out of exercises like these?)
• How are new scientific terms birthed?

Writing along with us? Willing to share? Leave a link in the comments!

Writing Science: Field Notes

The first topic on the table in the new course I'm teaching is Field Notes, but I'm also hoping to use this space as my own field notes on the course and for responses from those of you "in the field" (writing, reading, blogging, practicing science). If you want to follow along - or better yet kibbitz - I'm posting the writing prompts that start off every class, some of the writing assignments and the readings.

Writing Prompt Day 1
Tell me everything you know about Jello. 5 minutes. Start.

Writing Assignment
Make a transect. Map out a linear route and then make a detailed record of what you encounter along that route. The route can be long or short, indoors or out.Be imaginative. Examples: a transect across your room, on Merion green, across a microscope slide, a lab bench top, a parking lot. You can focus on a specific element in your transect, such as plant life, bacteria, or debris. If you chose to transcribe your notes (as Darwin did), attach the originals. Your notes should be roughly 300-400 words.

Questions I think it would be interesting to think about
Are field notes/lab notebooks completely objective records of what was observed?
Do they affect the science going forward?
Is it ok to be vivid and "over the top" in field notes? Do they have to be linear? in pen?
Why do think scientists rarely "get it right" in keeping notes? (Or at least that's what E. Bright Wilson thought.)

Readings for the first week:

• First Thoughts, from Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Shambhala, 2005.
• Beginner's Mind, Pen and Paper, Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Shambhala, 2005.
• Notebooks and Records in E.B. Wilson in An Introduction to Scientific Research, Dover, 1991.

And at least one from the list:

• Medicine in Translation, Danielle Ofri
• Trouble with the Editor, from Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Shambhala, 2005.
• Introduction, from Strunk, William, and E. B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition.
• Find a Voice and a Style, David Everett 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.
• The Open Sea (excerpt), Alister Hardy in Dawkins, Richard. The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing. Oxford University Press, USA, 2008.

• Complete collection of Linus Pauling's lab notebooks from Special Collections at Oregon State University.
• Charles Darwin's notebooks
• Some curatorial comments on Darwin's notebooks
  

Science in Translation: Online and Offline

ScienceOnline 2011 was this weekend. For various reasons I couldn't go in person and watching the stream of Tweets tagged #scio11 left me more than a bit wistful, but sessions in two rooms were streamed (thank you National Association of Science Writers!) so I could eavesdrop on and even contribute to some of the conversations that I was itching to have. Having just finished a piece for Nature Chemistry tackling some of the issues that the infamous Royce Murray editorial raised and being in the throes of getting ready to teach a new course, many of the topics on the table at the conference, from alt-metrics to science in fiction are on my mind.

Starting next week I'm teaching a new course called "Writing Science" -- a seven week exploration of the many ways science moves out of the lab or the field and into the wider world and what writing might have to do with such translations.

On the table are questions such as: How is science transformed as it moves out from the lab and the field into the broader scientific and lay communities? What gets lost (or found) in the translation from an article couched in equations and technical terms to an article in the Times or Discover? Who should be writing about science, or perhaps we should ask who's writing we should be reading? Is there a role in "official" (or "serious" or "real" or "scholarly", pick your adjective) science circles for "unofficial" channels like blogs and videos (the marvelous dance your Ph.D. thesis contest comes to mind!)?

We're reading and writing many genres - including: lab and field notes, the scholarly literature, things short and sweet (abstracts, tweets, radio spots, podcasts, blogs), science journalism, essays, humor, fiction, drama, poetry, and the visual.

The reading list is a work in progress, but if you want to follow along, I'll be posting each week's readings and writing prompts here - and some of the writing from willing participants.

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Illustration is a bit from Linus Pauling's lab notebooks. The entire set is digitized and available through Oregon State University's library here.