Comments on: Science Home Movies and Technical Ships in a Bottle

By: Nick Houtman

Nick Houtman — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 18:02:20 +0000

Well said, Carl. As a university science magazine editor, I get suggestions for topics as though the stories should be obvious. Undergraduate research. The oceans. A grant to study X. In some cases, the stories become obvious, but only after enough reporting and interviewing to understand the tensions, the actors, the scenes and the action.

By: John Hawks

John Hawks — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 00:55:17 +0000

I think this is so important, and you do well to bring it round to your students at the end. I think it’s something like reporting on a football game. Lots of intricate things may be going on, but you’ve got to find a narrative and tell it well. The irony is that when writers fall into the obvious narratives that would work for sports,, they look hackneyed for science.

I think it really is more challenging to write science well.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 19:10:00 +0000

There’s maybe one singer-songwriter on Earth who has successfully written a song about songwritting that is worth hearing. There aren’t any social media writers (yet) who have written a piece about producing social media commentary worth reading. But it appears that we’re making progress in science journalism. Science should be an easy sell.

Here’s a small contribution. I have a monthly astronomy TV program. I’ve been doing a segment called “Term of the Month”. I’ve been improving the quality of the segment rapidly, probably because i’m not fond of dictionaries. When was the last time you read one? Great vocabulary, but the plot is hard to follow. My approach until recently has been to write five minutes of content, and when it’s time to shoot it, i cram it into the three minutes i have, mostly by sacrificing the humor. It’s a bad idea. The humor is hard to write. I mean, the only astronomy joke i know is “Astronomy is looking up!” Sigh. The new idea is to sacrifice content. Horrors! And my very first attempt had my cameraman doing everything he could to keep from laughing out loud. He hadn’t seen my rehearsal, so it was new. This was the response i was looking for. I’d be willing to bet real money, maybe a dollar or even fifty cents, that people watching this bit will remember something from it. And the term of the month was “Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation”. An abstract and humorless idea if i ever heard one.

Humor isn’t the only way to do it. I was struck by the unlikely idea that i could feel sorry for cockroaches. That’s a great story for the kids at the dinner table.

By: johnk

johnk — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 18:01:49 +0000

Nice example.

Some suggestions:
#1. start with a question that people would like to know an answer to.
#2. play with the sequence of presentation. The sequence does not have to follow the experimental sequence.

#1 is really tricky, but essential. If you can pull the reader in with the question, your half-way home. There was an excellent segment on NOVA last week about how scientists use the molecular clock of lice to estimate major changes in human evolution and culture. I thought the show posed the question beautifully: they made the question seem significant, and made it clear what the major obstacles were to getting an answer.