#science writing

[greenteacology]

why did they name it PNAS. who thought that was a good name for a scientific journal.

#how am I supposed to read it as anything other than Peanas #academia #biology #ecology #science #science writing #grad school #university

[strangebiology]

Science Writing Resources

There are TONS of resources for science journalists and science communicators out there. In fact, I only have room to make a list of lists of resources for science journalists. Here they are: 

The Open Notebook's Science Writing Resources (elsewhere) That We Like (includes my group, Authors of Nonfiction Books in Progress)

Council for the Advancement of Science Writing's Connector, "a library of resources for science journalism & communication." 

SciCommers Community Resources

Science Writers News Roundup (newsletter)

The National Association of Science Writers' Write that Book!. A list of guides and resources viewable by NASW members.

The ultimate science writing resource guide by Shel Evergreen 

If you're not already aware, The Open Notebook and NASW themselves are great.

#Science Writing #science journalism #Science communication

[ninja-muse]

I've found my first review-worthy book of the year!

Eve by Cat Bohannon is a female-focused history of human evolution and a synthesis of pretty much every research field as it pertains to women. It's also readable and witty and one of those rare science books where I actively had to stop myself reading because I had to, say, go to bed.

Simply taking all the scientific research and turning it into layperson language would get this book praise. (You should see how many studies get cited.) Taking that research, relating it readably, and then drawing overarching conclusions? For instance, studies on how and when cis-female bodies produce sex hormones, and studies on how sex hormones affect neurology, and then saying something like, "this is why pregnant people are moodier"? That takes the whole thing to another level.

And it covers so much! It starts with the first mammals, moves through early primates and hominins, draws in studies of mice and apes and history and economics, talks about language and aging, and ends with the evolution of social relationships and thoughts on the future. There's a lot that I found enlightening, engaging, and validating, and a lot of moments where she reframed something and changed my thinking. And she's very comfortable calling out cultures and researchers and ways of thinking (and ducks and chimpanzees) for how they treat their species.

But like all books, it isn't perfect, though with such a subject, it probably couldn't be. For instance, because Bohannon is focusing so much on the average (i.e., cis-perisex) female body, trans and intersex folks don't come up much, though she's very clear that trans women are women, trans men are men, and intersex conditions are not problems. (Also, I'm sure the lack of info correlates strongly to a lack of studies, but she only mentions this a time or two.) *

More importantly, though, given that this is science writing and one expects scientists and writers to back up their claims, she doesn't always. Most of the time when she doesn't, it's clearly speculation or synthesis or some form of "if X, then Y" but sometimes it's less clear. I keep going back here to her statement that the first hominin culture with midwifery had exclusively female midwives. I would absolutely buy this, especially based on some of her points later in the chapter, but she never says why there couldn't have been the odd male. After all, later in the book she also mentions how men-who-help-women could have shifted the dynamics of the band/tribe/group closer to what we see today and that this probably started around the same time. To be fair, jumps like this are fairly rare but they do make me question if there were others I missed or more statements I should have questioned.

So basically, I'm saying this is an important book, and a good book, and a book that should be read by a lot of people, but also a book to read a little critically. Bohannon makes a lot of really great points and relates a lot of intriguing facts and tells some compelling stories about who we are and how we got here. She's done good work with this book and should be proud of it. But also, there might be some spots where her arguments could be tighter. *she also prioritizes words like "she" and "mother" and "woman" over words like "parent" and "person", which I can see not being great for some trans people even though I understand that she's trying to upend the notion that the average human is a cis male and show that female/afab bodies are pretty important.

#booklr #bookblr #adult booklr #science writing #book reviews #human evolution #hominins #cat bohannon #eve #my photos #read in 2024 #non-fiction #book recommendations

[tetw]

20 Great Articles by Philip Ball

He's one of the best science writers around -- he seems to be interested in everything and has an amazing ability to make any subject fascinating. Click through for 20 of Philip Ball's best articles from around the net.

#Philip Ball #Articles #Essays #Science Writing

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Hi Rebecca! I'm a recent(ish) graduated student interested in pursuing a career (or any other form of involvement) in environmental education. I was curious how you built your writing portfolio, especially writing for other sites/organizations? What first steps would recommend someone take (particularly if they're already graduated) to get into environmental education and scicomm? Thanks so much, love all your writing!!

Hi there, @misopossum! So I am a pretty atypical case. I have a BA in English, but I mainly used it for technical writing/editing (and personal journaling) for a number of years.

Most of the scicomm folks I know are either A) scientists who also have good writing and interpretation chops, or B) are science journalists who went through a formal journalism program in college/grad school. You haven't mentioned what your area of study was, but your department may have some resources to draw on if you haven't already spoken with them. Check with related departments as well, as they may have ideas too. You're a recent grad, but that doesn't mean that you can't still make use of those connections if they exist.

If you want to go a more traditional scicomm route, good places to start are The Open Notebook and the National Association of Science Writers. ScienceBites may be a good spot for you to start pitching a short article here and there to build up your portfolio, too. And this article from CrossTalk is a pretty good summary on how to get started with science writing.

Other people get involved with environmental education programs like forest schools, summer camps, and the like; some conservation nonprofits also may run these, and you can even check with state and federal parks, National Wildlife Refuges, and other governmental entities who may be in need of volunteers (or occasionally seasonal staff) for environmental ed programs.

You didn't mention where you are, but here in the PNW US there are a lot of these, especially in the Portland and Seattle areas. Depending on what your education level is you may not find the pay to be what you expected, and a lot of these programs are primarily in summertime. But if you can at least get in as a side gig, that will get some experience started.

A lot of what I do is meant for a general audience and not just specific to one locality. I do a lot of blogging online, to include articles on my website, plus some shorter form commentary on various news articles I find online that I think are worth exploring, and I have my quarterly chapbooks that let me dive deeper into various topics. These get me a pretty broad audience, beyond just my local area.

But I really got my start as a nature writer several years ago by writing pieces for the nonprofit Friends of Willapa National Wildlife Refuge, from Facebook posts to 2-3 minute radio segments for their Willapa Nature Notes segment on our local public radio station. I've also helped with other scicomm efforts they've run, from our 4th grade environmental education program in local schools, to giving talks and tours at our annual Wings Over Willapa birding and nature festival. And later this track record helped me get in as a regular columnist with the Coast Weekend paper (and occasionally a longer piece for related publications.) These are all incredibly local to where I am in the Columbia-Pacific region, but they've been good experience and they've helped me get my footing in my local community, which has helped me to facilitate other regional efforts like my independent guided tours.

I think the best choice I made overall was teaching non-credit community education classes through various community colleges, as well as municipal parks and recreation departments and libraries. It's a great way to connect with people who aren't pursuing a degree, but just learning for the fun of it. You do need some credentials of some sort, but expertise counts if you can show that you know your stuff--for example, the people teaching art classes don't all have art degrees, but they may have X number of decades' experience in their art medium. I don't have a degree in the natural sciences because my math skills are terrible, but I am a certified Oregon Master Naturalist and I also have a lifetime of experience of exploring nature and learning how to identify the living beings around me. It doesn't pay a lot, but it's a lot of fun and I get to meet a lot of new students every semester.

Be aware that people like me who take a more unorthodox route usually end up doing like eight different things for a living, rather than having one (1) career path. If you are going to do more of a "professional potpourri" like I am, you're going to need to seek out multiple niches, and perhaps create a few yourself. You're likely going to be very busy, and there's not going to be a lot of payoff immediately (as opposed to a regular job, where you start at a particular rate immediately and hopefully gets raises as things go along.)

On the bright side, having multiple professional directions means that if one of them isn't really active, I can often put more time toward another to make up for it. For example, I'd like to expand to writing for more varied venues that aren't just based in the PNW; it's just a matter of making the time to prep some cold pitches to publications and websites. This time of year I'm really busy with the tours business, so writing tends to be emphasized more in the off season. And either way you slice it, I'm still very much in the "building" process.

Aaaaanyway. That is my very long, rambling answer to your question. Please feel free to let me know if I can clarify anything for you, or if you have further questions.

#misopossum #science #science communication #SciComm #science writing #writing #writer #nonfiction #writers on Tumblr

[familiarquotation]

I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant. Come to think of it, this might be a good place to start.

Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell, Notes of a Biology Watcher

#lewis thomas #the lives of a cell #words #quotes #daily quotes #quote #quotations #science writing #science quotes #novels #novel writing #biology writing #biology #science #book quotes #book quotations #yes of course i posted this its almost an exact paraphrase of my favorite carl sagan quote #sorry for being gone so long! #I swear I'vee been reading a lot while I was gone though #so hopefully I'll have more to post now!

[house-rat]

I keep seeing that post going around about the irony of an article titled “The growing inaccessibility of science” being stuck behind a paywall and this is maybe a ridiculous nit to pick (which is why I’m making this its own post) but the article itself isn’t about its inaccessibility from a material standpoint but from a linguistic standpoint.

Like the entire article is an analysis of the jargon used in scientific journals and other scientific literature and how it has increased significantly over the 20th century, making research findings intelligible to a smaller and smaller niche. Its methodology is a little iffy but the conclusion is that there’s been a dramatic loss in forms of scientific communication that are intelligible to the general public. You can read the entire thing here, it’s a short paper.

(Also just as a fun bonus fact: part of the methodology involved creating a scale to measure the lexical difficulty of a given text; the lowest ranking was farm workers talking to dairy cows which scored -59.1 on the scale).

#science writing #science communication #house-rat

[xerxesxerxesxerxes]

https://alteritas.net/GXL/?p=5189

#parkinson's disease #dopamine #neuroscience #science writing #scientific writing

[thewriterkb]

It was nothing more than a storm in a teacup, I thought to myself. But I knew, better than most, how wrong this was.

Hot coffee swirled around nonsensically in a polystyrene cup on the table in front of me. A storm of colliding atoms and particles bursting in and out of existence. The definition of chaos. True chaos. Mathematical chaos. I was about a thousand words from finishing my PhD in dynamical systems, and I knew that a storm in a teacup was just about the most unpredictable thing that exis.... Click image to read more.

#fiction #flash fiction #short story #tormenta #storm #writing #novels #mathematics #physics #sci fi #science #science writing

[protoslacker]

This universality made it impossible for Pitts to provide a model of the brain that was practical, and so his work was dismissed and more or less forgotten by the community of scientists working on the brain. What’s more, the experiment with the frogs had shown that a purely logical, purely brain-centered vision of thought had its limits. Nature had chosen the messiness of life over the austerity of logic, a choice Pitts likely could not comprehend. He had no way of knowing that while his ideas about the biological brain were not panning out, they were setting in motion the age of digital computing, the neural network approach to machine learning, and the so-called connectionist philosophy of mind. In his own mind, he had been defeated.

Amanda Gefter in The Open Notebook. Storygram: Amanda Gefter’s “The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic”

The following story diagram—or Storygram—annotates an award-winning story to shed light on what makes some of the best science writing so outstanding.

Brendan Maher posted it and interviews Amanda Geter. The story was origionally published:

“The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic” Walter Pitts rose from the streets to MIT, but couldn’t escape himself. By Amanda Gefter, Nautilus Published February 5, 2015 (I replaced a not-working link to Nautilus story with one working today.)

#walter pitts #warren mcculloch #cybernetics #story #science writing

[ebookporn]

My Path to Becoming a Popular-Science Writer

by Greg Gbur

When I first became a Ph.D. student in physics, my parents asked me the question dreaded by every physics major: “So, what is it that you are actually studying?” As scientists and engineers, we are (hopefully) trained to speak to a specialized audience, but we are given little to no training in how to describe our work to the general public. There are, of course, journalists and professional science communicators who provide these sort of explanations full time, but it never hurts to be able to talk about our own work in as simple and compelling terms as possible.

"Good science communication and writing also require a lot of practice, and there are many ways to get it. For long-form writing, blog and newsletter sites are still active and vibrant. I have used WordPress and Tumblr, which have long been popular options, but these days there are many others as well. "

My path to science communication started in 2007, during the heyday of science blogging. I had been reading science blogs for a few years and was impressed by both the writing that was being done and the community that was growing. For almost 16 years now, I have been writing my own blog, “Skulls in the Stars,” where I talk about physics, optics, the history of science and whatever fun things capture my attention. This work directly led to my two popular-science books, Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics (2019) and Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen (2023), both published by Yale University Press. Every person’s path to writing a book is different, but here I will share how I did it and some insights I learned along the way.

READ MORE

#science writing #author interview #writing advice #writers on tumblr #writers life #writing career

[justaphage]

Write sleep-deprived, edit never.

#this mood brought to you by grant writing. #serious question: why can I only produce words at 1 in the morning #this is the one aspec of my job I can’t figure it out it how to actually improve at #science writing #“I know what I’m doing just give me the money’ is apparently not good enough for the government

[tenmongakusha]

I promise I am writing a book about outer space.

I promise.

It's just - I wanted to know when the flower was invented. And it's roughly 130 million years ago.

The oldest bee diverged from wasps 120 million years ago and it looks like the modern bee was around 100 million years ago in the fossil record, but then - how old are WASPS?

and apparently wasps have been around for 270 million years?

Which means those beasties survived the Permian extinction 250 million years ago, aka the largest mass extinction in the fossil record, wiping out 90% of marine species, and 70% of terrestrial species, aka The Great Dying.

but not the wasp.

#writblr #writerblr #writers of tumblr #rabbit hole #author #weird science #science writing #science side of tumblr

[science-simplified]

First Infographic of the Blog!

The aim of these is to be short and sweet, but informative and easy to understand.

Please give me any feedback you have!

#science #science writing #science communication #dna #biology #learning #info #infographic #add #adhd #simple science #op #education

[kaikubad-alig]

A Step-by-Step Guide to Successful Academic Writing

Academic writing can be a daunting task for students and researchers, but with a clear understanding of the steps involved, it can be a straightforward and rewarding experience. In this blog, we will walk you through the seven essential steps of academic writing, providing tips and examples along the way. Whether you’re writing a research paper, an essay, or any other type of academic document,…

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#academic skills #academic writing #better writing #research #research paper writing #research skills #research writing #science writing #steps #writing skill

[scienceinenglish]

Clarity and creativity: When to use two different words that mean the same thing

Academic writing in the hard sciences values clarity over poetry, even when most other forms of English writing do not. This can mean making different choices.

I remember a middle school teacher telling me not to use the same verb in three sentences in a row, even though the subjects of all three sentences were doing the same thing. The teacher said it was boring, and—typical for the era—implied that it was lazy. I said I was just being clear.

Much of English learning in the K-12 system leans heavily toward vocabulary acquisition, to the point where high school juniors have to be told, usually more than once, that yes they should write “say” instead of “vociferate” in their college application essays. The transition from the in-school attitude of gaming the system for higher grades by showing off either obscure words or multiple words that mean the same thing does not mesh well with the adult world’s need for people to get to the point before everyone in the Thursday afternoon meeting succumbs to boredom-induced brain death.

In life science academic writing, it is almost always best to choose exactly one word and stick with it for the whole paper. I often tell clients, “I know the thesaurus says they’re synonyms, but don’t say ‘show’ in this sentence and ‘demonstrate’ in the next unless you mean you did two different things” (which sometimes they did).The inverse of that, however, is that if you do mean two different things, then yes you should use different words, and this doesn’t only apply to verbs.

The word “element” means “essential piece.” It’s perfectly clear and correct to say “the elements of good laboratory technique include precision and efficiency.” But if your paper also discusses the elements of the periodic table, it might be best to save “element” for oxygen and carbon and choose “foundation” or “essential part” when talking about other things.

Our readers don’t always read the articles as carefully as we write them. Some people skim them for the basics. The mistakes that this can cause are embarrassing enough in fields like literature or political science, but they don’t lead to anything like the fume hood blowing up or anything important escaping from sample vial #4.

Sets of synonyms to which this may apply:

“Component,” “element,” and “part” (“part” can also mean “to separate”)

“Important,” “significant,” “pronounced”

“One” and “single” when “one” is used as an adjective, as in “one lung ventilation”

“Higher,” “increased” (as adjective)

“Old,” “older,” and “elderly.” In a weird twist of English, “older” means less old than “old” when applied to people.

Comment below with your opinions or any other sets of words you think should go on this list.

#writing #science writing #English #English language