SciOnline - Friday talks

This is the third instalment from the SciOnline 2011 conference, where Lucas talks about the workshops he attended on Friday afternoon, the first full day of the conference.

Lucas

The most evil sentence in the world

The Friday afternoon program of Science Online 2011 was dedicated to several workshops (my Friday morning was dedicated to sleeping late and having breakfast). In a workshop on science writing, I learned that some sentences are more evil than others. One of the most evil sentence in the world is this beast, concocted by science writers Carl Zimmer and Ed Yong:

"Interestingly, it has been known for some time that DNA is compacted into higher-order structures within the nucleus but understanding the mechanism through which the DNA is kept accessible to the cell's enzymatic machinery is non-trivial and remains to be elucidated."

Ed and Carl gave this sentence as the perfect example of how you should not write about science. The challenge for us, the audience, was to rewrite it into something that somebody might actually want to read. But before we were thrown into the deep, Ed and Carl shared their science writing insights with us.

The most important take-home message for me was that whatever and for whomever you are writing, your foremost concern should always be to tell a story. Your writing will be read by someone hanging from a strap in the underground. Every millisecond, that reader may decide to flip the page or click another link. Your job is to prevent that from happening and draw him into your article or blog post.

Before you start writing, you should already have thought out the story that you want to tell. Including the story that you don't want to tell. It is impossible to include every little detail or interesting . If you limit yourself to what really matters, your writing will be better for it.

There's not much ground that Ed and Carl didn't cover. On the topic of scientific jargon, Carl told us that after crossing out the same words in his student's essay time and time again, he now maintains a list of banned words. His students are forbidden to use any of the words on this list. It features words like 'elucidate', 'interaction' and 'utilize', which are classic examples of science-speak. 'Elucidate' is just a fancy way of saying 'clarify' and most normal people say 'use' instead of 'utilize'. Scientists use these words in their publications because they convey authority and signal to their peers that they are part of the same scientific in-crowd. But these words have no place in science writing for larger audience. Instead of making things more clear, they complicate and conceal.

And while I never thought of Ed Yong as a violent kind of person, I might have to reconsider after seeing him calling for the death of adverbs. The bottom line of his passionate plea, as you can guess, was that you should never use certain adverbs. Ever. If you have to use words like 'interestingly', 'excitingly' and 'amazingly' to point out that what you write is interesting, exciting or amazing, you are doing something wrong!

Before the workshop came to its end, we turned our collective attention to the evil sentence. There are a couple of things that went wrong in the 41 words above. The sentence is too long and winding and packed with difficult words that mean simple things. Other words, like 'nucleus', seem innocent, but contain insights gained over decades of research under their surface. Scientists find these words convenient, but for that person reading your article in a tram, a nucleus means nothing. A nucleus could be just as abstract for him as a neutrino is for me. With this in mind, I rewrote the sentence like this:

"Inside every single cell of your body, crammed into a space that is only a hundredth of a millimeter wide, lies a string of DNA. That string is three meters long. Because the DNA is wound up tightly, like a coiled spring, it can achieve this immense compression. But the genetic information that lies on the DNA still needs to be read from time to time. It is still unknown to scientists how the cell's molecules access and read the DNA when it is coiled up this way."

The analogy to a coiled spring might not be 100% accurate. Real DNA is not wound up like spring, but it is coiled around proteins called histones, and those histones tend to stack on top of each other, and... But my goal is not to give the reader a complete crash course in cellular biology. My goal is to tell something interesting about compacted DNA. I hope I succeeded at least somewhat in this regard.

As a self-taught blogger, it was a joy to listen to and learn from these great science writers. But this is not a conference where the attendees are firmly divided into the 'experienced' and 'inexperienced' or 'professionals' and 'amateurs'. Just a few hours later, these same great writers were standing next to me, holding a beer, available for some smalltalk or intelligent conservation. Barriers don't exist at Science Online.