How to...
Write science (for non-scientists)
September 2007
Our expert: Dr Philip Ball (PhD 1988), freelance science writer and a consultant editor for Nature.
Ask yourself why?
The implication is that you’re a scientist yourself, right? Or at least, I take it you have had some scientific training? Maybe you have just done some earth-shattering research and are eager to tell the world about it. Perhaps you didn’t do it yourself, but read it in a journal or heard it at a conference and feel it just has to be communicated. Or maybe you fancy getting into journalism (which is great provided that you’re not doing it for the money). Whatever the reason, don’t pick up your pen or switch on your computer until you have asked yourself: why am I doing this? And if you don’t have a good answer, forget it until you do.
Seduce your readers
Then you need to identify your potential readers. Are they the kind who buy New Scientist every week? Or will they just stumble across your piece in a newspaper or magazine? Remember that, whoever they are, they aren’t obliged to read a single word of what you write. You might think that your topic should be obligatory knowledge for everyone – but if you bore or confuse or patronize your readers, they’ll put the article down without a moment’s thought. You have to seduce them.
Illuminate
That needn’t mean dumbing down or stuffing in bad jokes. It means (for example) that you speak to adults as adults, and children as children. Not only must you avoid jargon, but you should be alert to science’s habitual figures of speech, which tend to take a lot for granted. You should look for metaphors that are genuinely illuminating. And it means that you must tell a story. There are lots of narrative forms to choose from, and fiction writers have done you the favour of inventing them all already.
And finally, remember to enjoy it. If you don’t, no one else will.
Philip Ball is a freelance science writer and a consultant editor for Nature. His book Critical Mass won the Aventis Prize for science books in 2005, and his latest book is The Devil’s Doctor (Heinemann, 2006). He gained his PhD in physics from Bristol in 1988.