Chandra Boon's List: Science Journalism Resources

• The varying distribution of fresh water across the globe, involving complex patterns of rainfall in space and time, crucially affects the ecosystems and infrastructure on which human societies depend.

   

  Climate change may be hitting home.

   

  Which of those stories do you suppose was written by an academic scientist and which was written by a science writer?
• Overall, both were very well written pieces. But their first sentences sure do strikingly exemplify the differences in the culture of written expression between research scientists and journalists.
• Scientists can definitely learn a thing or two about communication from science journalists. I don’t want to transform my manuscripts into text that reads like journalism, because the two forms of writing serve very different purposes for very different audiences. But reading good science writing online and practicing my own writing here have immeasurably improved my consideration of word choices, sentence structure, the value of an engaging first paragraph (or lede), and sense of narrative arc.
• So my unsolicited advice to fellow scientists is: “If you want to write better, start by carefully reading good writing.”
• In both articles, I got an overview of what the studies did and what they found, and in the second article I learned about implications for the insurance industry, adding context. But I lost the “why.” And it’s the why that allows us to translate what we’ve learned in one situation or study into another.

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