Clearer, more engaging science writing

Tips for Engaging academic writing

• Make the reader care. This is job #1.
• Set up a mystery.
• Embrace uncertainty. Make the reader reflect and think.
• Answers are boring; reveal them slowly.
• Use anecdotes containing people with personalities.
• Use vivid imagery to set up a scene.
• Be concrete; use specific examples.
• Use graphs and images to tell your story, not as information dumps.

Excerpts

I read excerpts from the following books during my talk. The books are in order of how I presented them.

• Dawkins, R. (2010). The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. London: Black Swan.

• Einstein, A. (1997). Relativity: The Special and General Theory. New York: Three Rivers Press.

• Hawking, S. (2011). A Brief History Of Time: From Big Bang To Black Holes. Bantam.

• Pinker, S. (2015). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. London: Penguin.

• Singh, S. (2002). Fermat’s Last Theorem: The Story Of A Riddle That Confounded The World’s Greatest Minds For 358 Years (New Ed edition). London: Fourth Estate Ltd.

Science writers worth reading

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” – Stephen King

This list is, of course, not exhaustive!

• John Barrow (mathematics)

• Richard Dawkins (biology)

• Richard Feynman (physics)

• James Gleick (mathematics)

• John Gribbin (physics)

• Stephen Hawking (physics)

• Steven Pinker (psychology)

• Oliver Sacks (neuroscience/psychology)

• Neil Shubin (biology)

• Simon Singh (mathematics)

• Ed Yong (biology)

Reading about writing

“Whatever cannot be said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either.” – Peter Singer

• Gopen, G. & Swan, J. (2018). The Science of Scientific Writing. (2018, January 3). Retrieved June 26, 2018, from https://www.americanscientist.org/blog/the-long-view/the-science-of-scientific-writing

• Pinker, S. (2014, September 26). Why Academics Stink at Writing. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/why_academics_stink_at_writing.pdf

• Pinker, S. (2015). The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. London: Penguin.

• Plaxco, K. W. (2010). The art of writing science. Protein Science: A Publication of the Protein Society, 19(12), 2261–2266. https://doi.org/10.1002/pro.514

• Sword, H. (2012). Stylish Academic Writing. Harvard University Press.