I'm Roberta Kwok, one of the NASW travel fellows. I'll be blogging on Saturday about the session "Great science writing part II: Building the big book," which features science-writing superstars K.C. Cole, Jennifer Ouellette, Charles Seife, Jonathan Weiner, and Carl Zimmer. As a former creative-writing student, I'm excited to hear their insights about how literary devices can be used to communicate science.
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The posts on this blog will mostly come from travel fellows, who've agreed to cover specific events at the meeting as they happen. Good stuff in case you have to miss a concurrent session, or if the early morning ones defeat your best intentions to get up, go for a run, and be the first one to crack the valve on the coffee urn.
Nancy Shute, president of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), asked the new NASW board members (I am one) last week if we would help give assignments to travel fellows who won NASW grants to attend the ScienceWriters 2010 conference.
The Open Notebook opens up the science writing process for your scrutiny. Plus science-related election miscellany.
The Words' Worth database is a place for NASW members to report their own experiences with freelancing clients and find valuable information from other members about what they did, what they charged, and how it went — information that can help you improve your business.
The National Association of Science Writers will once again sponsor travel fellowships to the upcoming AAAS meeting for undergraduate students interested in science journalism. As many as 10 students will receive up to $750 in travel expenses to attend AAAS in Washington, D.C., Feb. 17-21, 2011. NASW's education committee will select students to receive the fellowship and will pair each one with a veteran writer for a one-day mentoring program.
Leaving my last job was easy: I got laid off, along with 104 other Time Inc. employees. My boss called with the news on the morning of my 45th birthday. Like so many other journalists, I had finally acquired enough experience and seniority to make myself unaffordable.
[image: 1, right, medium]ProPublica presents a database of doctors on the take from pharmaceutical companies, and praise is not universal. Mandelbrot is dead, but the Mandelbrot Set lives on. And Schrodinger's Cat acquires a canine companion.
Science and the Media, a new (and free) volume from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the result of a series of workshops that considered ways to enrich Americans' engagement with science and technology.