Apart from reading a lot about science and technology, I’ve also been reading as much as I can about writing and journalism. I find it useful to try to incorporate things that I like about other people’s writing into my own.
Here’s a few recent links that I came across:
1. A talk by William Zinsser, which he gave to the incoming international students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, August 11, 2009.
I found it both useful and funny, which is always a good combination. Unfortunately as of 2009-10 Columbia’s science writing graduate program doesn’t exist anymore, but at least their general journalism program is still going strong.
The speech is well worth reading in full, but here’s the take-away:
“Repeat after me:
Short is better than long.
Simple is good. (Louder)
Long Latin nouns are the enemy.
Anglo-Saxon active verbs are your best friend.
One thought per sentence.”
2. Cornell Alumni Magazine’s piece about how Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style got published.
I’ve had The Elements of Style ever since my freshman year of college, and was recently gifted an illustrated version when I got my PhD. It’s got handy tips for any writer, and though I had no idea that Strunk was from Cornell, it’s an interesting bit of history.
3. A couple of links about fact-checking from Carl Zimmer’s Blog and The New Yorker.
Fact-checking is obviously crucial for good journalism of any kind, but it’s especially important for science journalism, only because for most scientific topics, a reporter’s never going to be able to fully grasp the details (after all, it took some scientist years and years of study to get there), and it’s all too easy to have miscommunications. Of course, it’s the writer’s responsibility to do all he or she can to double-check everything with the scientist to make sure it’s correct, but errors still creep in, and fact-checkers do an absolutely crucial job in getting rid of those – the reputations of many a newspaper or magazine relies on them.
On the one hand, I think my science/research background makes me try to be extra-careful and accurate when it comes to the facts in my article. Still, doing it for a scientific paper was very different from how I do it now, and I’m still learning how to double-check everything I write to make sure it’s accurate. As a scientist writing about my own research, I was used to being the expert, and so I either knew whether something was a fact, or knew exactly where to look it up. Here, I’m no longer the expert on anything I write about, and it adds an extra layer of trickiness to make sure I ask the relevant experts the right questions to verify what I write.
Also, as a scientist, I could write something as long as I could reference it to a peer-reviewed paper. After talking to some other PhDs turned writers I realized that an over-reliance on published information could also lead to mistakes – it depends on where it’s published, and even then sometimes it’s best to double-check it anyway; the information may be outdated, or *gasp*, a scientist might have made a mistake that went unnoticed by the editors. It’s not like that doesn’t happen…
Anyway, the bottom-line is that fact-checking is a crucial skill for any writer, and even though it can be time-consuming, I try to make sure all my facts are correct. I also try to document all their sources, it saves a lot of time down the line when I need to justify why something that I wrote is factually correct.
I just found the process funny, in some ways it reminded me of stuff I did as a scientist, and in other ways it was so different I had to start from scratch. I guess that holds true for a lot of things that I’m learning now 🙂