Can science writers learn from folklore? Michele Arduengo says yes: "The fairy tale 'The Twelve Brothers' provides a great study in time management, slowing down time when the details are critical, such as the day the daughter discovers the truth about her brothers and sets off after them, and speeding up time to move the plot forward when the details are unimportant: 'They spent ten years in the little cottage, where they were safe, and the time passed quickly.'"
Science writing news
President Obama unveils his proposed budget. For science and medicine, there's a bit of good news, but mostly not, in this hypothetical numbers game. Down with prostate cancer screening! Down with robotic surgery, too? Scientific jargon confuses scientists. Cloning is easy. A new imaging technique makes brains transparent.
Chad Orzel is a scientist who blogs, and he sounds uneasy about increasing competition from professional science writers: "I worry that the professionalization of the hobby is squeezing out the, well, hobbyists. One of the things I try to stress is that blogging is a low-maintenance activity — it can be done on a strictly hobby-type basis, by people who do not have and do not necessarily want careers in science writing. Blogging doesn’t have to be a career."
In this excerpt from the upcoming Science Writers' Handbook, Emily Gertz advises journalists how to use social media in their work without hitting any career-damaging tripwires. Also, Sarah Webb reflects on how blogging became a central part of her writing business. The Science Writers' Handbook was funded by an NASW Idea Grant and this excerpt is viewable by NASW members only. You can pre-order the NASW-funded Handbook from the NASW Bookstore.
Fiction writer Tricia Drammeh calls independent publishers a "plague" and writes that the services they promise aren't worth their prices: "Any author can hire an editor, commission cover art, and outsource formatting. We all have access to print on demand services, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. So why do we need a publisher? We don’t. Why give up control of your book and a percentage of royalties to someone who doesn’t have any more clout in the industry than you do?"
Simon Kuper takes the contrarian view on how social media has affected written English in this Financial Times post: "George Orwell in 1944 lamented the divide between wordy, stilted written English, and much livelier speech. 'Spoken English is full of slang,' he wrote, 'it is abbreviated wherever possible, and people of all social classes treat its grammar and syntax in a slovenly way.' His ideal was writing that sounded like speech. We’re getting there at last."
Some editors ban them. Many others discourage them. But email interviews have a solid place in reporting, Mark Lisheron writes for American Journalism Review: "Journalism professionals put email at the very bottom of their interviewing hierarchies, below the interview in person, below the phone interview," Lisheron writes. But, he continues, "email is a tool, in the box alongside the sit-down and the phoner, convenient, quick, precise and very often essential."
It's ugly, it's overused, and it's almost worthless as a search tool. That sums up Daniel Victor's objections to the Twitter hashtag in this Nieman Journalism Lab post. Then why do we use it? Because we're told to, Victor writes: "Shaking a Polaroid picture didn’t make it develop any faster. Blowing on Nintendo cartridges didn’t help, either. We’ve all been told at some point that hashtags connect you to more people, and it’s been widely accepted as fact."
In The Science Writers’ Handbook, 35 writers, most NASW members, and most freelancers by choice, tell how to hone writing skills, find new markets, and mind your own business. They include advice on managing family and home, while meeting deadlines.
In the 3rd edition of For God, Country and Coca-Cola, Mark Pendergrast explores controversies Coca-Cola has encountered in the past decade, including its alleged role in fostering obesity, and tells how the company reacted and retooled.