Science writing news

This collection of quotes on writing by writers comes from Australia's Aerogramme Writers' Studio. It includes Kurt Vonnegut on semicolons, Joyce Carol Oates on the difference between technique and content, and this from Dorothy Parker: "If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy."

Following up on the now-old news that modern humans carry some Neanderthal DNA, Tabitha M. Powledge explores some of the details. Females may have benefitted from the genome-mixing, she writes, and there are signs that our ability to speak did not come from the Neanderthals. Also, examining the widespread misinterpretations of the Congressional Budget Offices's new Obamacare report. And the frightening news from China about two new bird flu strains appearing in humans.

From Bárbara Mendes-Jorge, here are five pointers for calling attention to your organization's events by covering them live on Twitter. At the top of her list is the wise use of Twitter's signature hashtags: "Using a hashtag will group all your tweets, enabling people searching for the event hashtag (or the hashtag you think up) to find them. It also makes it clear to your followers that you are tweeting about a certain event, not just spouting off random sound bites."

Keyboards have replaced paper as the note-taking medium of choice, especially for college students. But Wray Herbert writes about an experiment that concluded the old-fashioned handwritten method is more effective for understanding: "The students using laptops were in fact more likely to take copious notes, which can be beneficial to learning. But they were also more likely to take verbatim notes, and this 'mindless transcription' appeared to cancel out the benefits."

A new e-book from the European Journalism Centre and Poynter's Craig Silverman uses case studies and expert debunkers to show how to tell news from hoax in the Twitter age. Silverman writes: "With so much misinformation flowing fast and freely, and the ability for anyone to easily shoot, share and/or manipulate images and video, the skills of verification have never been more important. Yet it's not taught on an ongoing basis in most newsrooms."

Rebecca Allen points out the differences between the two story forms in an archived Nieman Storyboard post. The ledes may be identical, but after that: "In a news feature, the writer would let the reader know what is new with Hortense, something like: Miller can't go into her garden these days. Since she broke her hip while showing the garden, she uses a wheelchair. But in a narrative, the writer withholds how the story turns out and instead goes back to the beginning."

Tabitha M. Powledge discusses the evidence on whether or not there are too many scientific studies whose results can't be reproduced in subsequent work. Her main point is that you can't put all of "science" in the same basket: "Those of us professionally interested in science are going to know that different fields of science have very different track records." Also, gauging how much of Tuesday's State of the Union speech was devoted to science, directly or otherwise.