The moral of the Jonah Lehrer story: Science writing is impossible because of the human brain. Nevertheless, lobbying for the Brain Activity Map. The Darwin finch genome project. Obamacare news: the Republicans are bringing us socialized medicine.
Science writing news
The idea was a natural. Modeled loosely on the short, single-topic boot camps of the Knight Science Journalism program or the National Center for Atmospheric Research, ours would be the first on astronomy to be offered on the West Coast, and the first anywhere on computational astronomy.
Freedom isn't all it's cracked up to be, Andrew Careaga writes on Higher Ed Marketing, using Twitter's famous 140-character limit as an example. Working under such constraints can, paradoxically, lead to creative solutions: "Haiku (the 5/7/5 syllable constraint). Limericks. Music (only seven notes to work with). All are constrained. Yet when creative minds accept and work within those constraints, they can create beauty, or at least (with limericks) a laugh or a smile."
Tim Radford in the Guardian offers some advice to science writers: "Beware of long and preposterous words. Beware of jargon. If you are a science writer this is doubly important. If you are a science writer, you occasionally have to bandy words that no ordinary human ever uses, like phenotype, mitochondrion, cosmic inflation, Gaussian distribution and isostasy. So you really don't want to be effulgent or felicitous as well. You could just try being bright and happy."
Ten talented juniors and seniors from across the country gathered in Boston Feb. 14-18 to report on the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting as NASW's undergraduate travel fellows for 2013. During the next several days, we will be posting their reports here.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Amy Ellis Nutt shares some tips for editing your own writing in a new advice column on Nieman Storyboard. She says this about passive verbs: "Write in the active voice, not the passive. I’m amazed at how often this still happens in my own writing. Avoid: 'to be,' 'to have' and 'to do.' And make sure your verbs push the story forward. As F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote to his daughter, 'All fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentence.'"
If this doesn't draw an audit — or worse — it will be a miracle. Michael N. Marcus offers innovative tips for cutting your income taxes: "If you are an author or a journalist, the key to creative tax avoidance is to write about things you like … If you smoke, write about pipes, cigars, tobacco, hashish or marijuana — and deduct the cost of your research. A trip to a cigar factory, a bong or nickel bag can be as important to your writing career as Microsoft Word."
As you probably know, Jonah Lehrer again. Lehrer gave a Fat Tuesday talk explaining away his plagiarism and other sins against science journalism. The reviews were terrible. The Knight Foundation paid him $20,000 for the talk. The reviews were terrible for that, too.
It isn't being published until April, but you can order this NASW-funded guide now at a discount from Amazon.com by using this NASW bookstore link. In the Science Writers’ Handbook, 35 science writers "share their hard-won wisdom and illuminating stories, going beyond the basics to cover everything else you need to survive and thrive as a science writer." Also, direct orders for 10% off the cover price will be available soon to NASW members.