With the Internet's emergence comes a new issue: When to credit an earlier source of your story. At 10,000 Words, Meranda Watling offers advice and a tip on adding value: "If you can’t be first, be the most complete source or be the most original. Maybe you can connect the news of the day to some past event or some other business that will be affected by it in an unexpected way," she says. "Connect the dots for your readers. That’s what they’re coming to you for."

You know who you are. You took typing in high school and you still put two spaces after a period, because that's how you were taught. Well, cut it out, says Slate's Farhad Manjoo: "Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It's one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men's shirt buttons on the right and women's on the left."

Joanna Penn outlines her nine-step process for turning an ugly first draft into a finished product, ready for publication, and beyond. Step five is dealing with your line editor's critique: "The first time you get such a line edit, it hurts. You think you’re a writer and then someone changes practically every sentence. Ouch. But editing makes your book stronger, and the reader will thank you for it." Also from Penn, editing through community.

From time to time, all of us will find ourselves wondering whether all of the blood, sweat, and tears that we put into our work are making a difference. There are a lot of academics in the field who are very interested in these questions, and in this issue we feature three articles that we hope will expand your thinking about the ways in which science writers make a difference in their professional, local, and global communities.