Science Communication for Scientists: Linking Strategy with Creativity, Practice, and Respect by Lindenfeld Laura

Author:Lindenfeld, Laura
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2025-09-15T05:04:08+00:00

8

Communicating in Writing

DOI: 10.4324/9781003493938-12

Take a few moments after you’ve read this paragraph to close your eyes. Really, close your eyes. Recall something you’ve read that has genuinely stuck with you. You may remember vivid details and how you felt as you were reading. Xia remembers reading a story in Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. The author describes a birthday party she held using clean diapers as plates for cake to bring to life the idea that our brain uses prior experiences and knowledge to construct emotions. She made her point: none of the guests found this appetizing; instead, their past experiences with diapers left them feeling queasy. Laura vividly remembers reading Matt Richtel’s An Elegant Defense, which explains how the immune system functions. She was moved to tears by the end: throughout the book, the author explores how our immune system works through the intimate stories of four individual patients, humanizing the complex science and medical content and making it deeply moving.

Try to recall some moments in your life when you could not stop reading (we hope you have some such moments). What kept you engaged and reading? Was it the storyline, getting answers to your burning questions, your ability to identify with the characters? Were you reading about something so interesting or bizarre that you became deeply immersed? If you cannot recall scenarios where writing engaged you so deeply, we imagine you’ve encountered the opposite—boring, hard-to-understand, irrelevant writing that you’ve had to slog your way through. Maybe you’ve also been in a situation where the only medium accessible was a magazine or newspaper—like on an airplane before takeoff? In situations like these, people often flip … flip … flip … and, when the time comes, switch to more engaging media or do other things. After all, no one wants to read something that alienates or bores them.

As science communicators, we should strive to create written content that captures our readers’ attention and reshapes their understanding of the world. In this chapter, we want to help you produce memorable and engaging writing that results in meaningful engagement with your audiences. Even more, we want to help you develop writing skills that make science stick because it makes people care, leading to deeper understanding and lasting impact. In writing this chapter, we assume that you are a reader. It is hard to imagine a good writer who doesn’t also read voraciously. You may be able to write clearly as a non-reader, but it seems likely that you will miss out on opportunities to develop mental models for what makes writing compelling.

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