With that in mind, I want to briefly introduce a unifying theme for the ideas laid out on this website that I hope will provide a lodestone for navigating this tricky landscape.

Introducing the AIR Concept for Science Writing

From a storytelling standpoint, scientific discoveries are like seeds.

They are pure potential. Consider the short abstract that appears at the top of most scientific papers: a block of jargony text tightly packed with information, dense and, to the uninitiated, impenetrable.

For the non-expert reader, the typical scientific abstract offers little evidence of the fascinating flower hidden within. The science writer’s job is to germinate that dense, information-rich seed through interviews and research, to bring the seed to blossom through compelling prose, and to help it emerge fully matured into the open air.

Here, then, is our unifying concept: AIR. The foundations of science communications as I see them can be summed up through the use of this heuristic, and we will explore its meaning in more detail in other articles.

But for now, suffice it to say that AIR stands for Accessible, Intriguing, and Relevant – three characteristics that make for strong science writing and storytelling. Here are our short working definitions:

• Accessible — Conveying clear meaning
• Intriguing — Arousing curiosity or providing entertainment   
• Relevant — Providing useful information

As you proceed through this site, keep in mind these characteristics. If you get overwhelmed, confused, or otherwise hit a wall, they can help you regroup and find your way through the morass.

At a Minimum, Science Writing Should be Accessible

Let’s go a little deeper. Every piece of popular science communications needs to be accessible so the reader or viewer can comprehend the ideas, events and import of the story.

If the audience can’t understand what’s being said or gets thoroughly confused, they will simply turn away. Instagram awaits!

Unfortunately, science communication in its raw form is often particularly inaccessible. Take these titles of papers published in Nature and Science, two of the most widely read journals in the world:

Multimetallic catalysed cross-coupling of aryl bromides with aryl triflates

Circuit-specific signaling in astrocyte-neuron networks in basal ganglia pathways

Coherent coupling between a ferromagnetic magnon and a superconducting qubit

These papers were published in top journals, which is a hint that they may turn out to be important discoveries. For the average person, though, these titles are gobbledygook. They are castle walls hiding the meaning within. The first step for the science writer is opening the gate and throw out the welcome mat. 

Even if you throw open the gates, it doesn’t mean your guests are going to come in. Accessibility is the first step to ensuring the reader, viewer or listener will stick with you as the story unfolds, but it’s really only a start.

Science Stories Should Also be Intriguing or Relevant or (Ideally!) Both

Who wants to hang out with someone who tells entirely comprehensible but boring, irrelevant stories? We want to hear intriguing and important stories, right? That’s where the other two elements of the AIR trifecta come into play: intriguing and relevant. Making a story accessible opens the door to the audience; making it interesting and relevant convinces them to come inside. 

In many ways, interest and relevance are two sides of the same coin. If something is interesting, it is likely to be relevant, if only because it is entertaining.

YouTube videos of cute animals are inconsequential “fluff,” but millions of people watch them every day. Why? We humans have an inborn need to smile and laugh and feel that everything is going to be alright — and this need is not trivial. Life is tough and we need relief from the rigors of living in an imperfect world. Playful kittens are relevant because they provide that escape for many YouTube viewers.

While acknowledging this relationship between intrigue and relevance (and noting at times how they can be addressed simultaneously), for our purposes we will discuss them mostly as discrete concepts. To demonstrate the distinction, let’s explore examples of stories that lean heavily on one element or the other.

Intrigue vs. Relevance

First, a scientific paper that possessed hidden intrigue. The report by researchers at the University of Exeter in Britain, published in the journal, Methods in Ecology and Evolution, was titled: 

“Image calibration and analysis toolbox – a free software suite for objectively measuring reflectance, colour and pattern.” 

The title is faintly accessible. At least we get that it’s some kind of free software, and that the software has something to do with images.

Is our curiosity piqued? Heck no.

But surprise, surprise, this paper was fodder for a New York Times blog piece. It turns out that the scientists had developed a computer algorithm that converts digital photographs into “animal vision,” allowing scientists to glimpse the world the way insects or animals see it.

The far more intriguing title of the New York Times post on the paper was: Tool Gives Researchers ‘Animal Vision’. The paper included images that had been converted to animal vision, along with the originals.

For instance, the shot below shows the blooms of the flower Echium angustifolium, the left image in human vision, and the right from a bee’s perspective.

In nature, bees can see two patches at the top of the flower (greenish yellow) that absorb ultraviolet light, and the animal vision program allows us also to see them.

This is a great example of finding something compelling in an ostensibly dry science paper. The Times reporter dug up a nugget of ‘gee-whiz’ science buried in a mundane headline, and summed it up with an intriguing concept: animal vision.

It’s also a model for a story where intrigue outways relevance.

Do you want to know how animals see differently? Sure, sounds cool. Do you really need this? Unless you’re a scientist, probably not. There may be some really important applications for this, but in the context of this story, we really just want to try on the “animal vision” goggles. This was a high intrigue story.

On the other hand, another New York Times medical news headline from around the same time heralds a story that hinges on its relevance:

Study Finds Drug Lowers Risk of Diabetes Complications

The story, an Associated Press brief syndicated by the Times, reported the results of a clinical trial of a diabetes drug called Jardiance. The study found that the drug delayed the time until patients died of cardiovascular disease or suffered a heart attack or stroke–the all-too-common and dire complications of diabetes.

Clearly, this is not a story meant to entertain or appeal to curiosity, as few people seek distraction by reading about the deadly comorbidities of diabetes. Then again, for someone who has diabetes or has a loved one with the disease, the subject is literally a matter of life and death.

A diabetic informed about this new drug might inquire about it next time they visit their doctor, possibly buying additional days, weeks, months, or even years of life. What’s more relevant than staying alive? 

Broadly speaking, science, technology, and medicine stories are relevant if they help us to understand the world and, ideally, to make informed choices. Things that are not in the least ‘entertaining’ can be very relevant and command attention.

The toolbox of a well-rounded science communicator will include tools for enhancing both intrigue and relevance in our stories.

Make a story more intriguing may require the rhetorical equivalent of, say, a drill while making it more relevant calls for a saw. Sometimes, a single tool can do both jobs.

In other articles, we will explore the distinct skills necessary for these tasks, all the time knowing that they are both central to building the solid framework of a science story. 

Before we wrap up chapter, let’s review by laying out working definitions for all three elements of the AIR approach once again:

• Accessible — Conveying clear meaning
• Intriguing — Arousing curiosity or providing entertainment   
• Relevant — Providing useful information

These definitions may seem overly simplistic, but they describe the essence of a compelling science story and will provide a touchstone for our explorations of science writing.

Much of the American public is ill-informed about the scientific consensus on topics such as evolution, stem cell research, vaccinations, and climate change. In the age of the Internet and social media, misinformation abounds and many people have difficulty discerning fact from fiction, propaganda from journalism, and conspiracy theory from scientific theory.

We’ve Got a Science Communication Problem

A recent Gallup poll found that more than 40 percent of Americans believe that “God created humans in their present form,” which translates as a belief that humans didn’t evolve from other life forms. The parody newspaper The Onion ran a headline announcing that “Kansas Outlaws the Practice of Evolution,” a sendup of that state’s willful and persistent misadventures in science education.

In California, where I live, whooping cough and measles made a comeback as a result of parents’ misguided fears of getting their children vaccinated.

We live in the information age, accelerated by the Internet, social media and mobile computing power. The downside is that misinformation is rampant and spreads through digital and social networks like wildfires burning a path of misunderstanding and confusion.

As I write this, the country is seized by a deadly coronavirus pandemic that has ignited an epidemic of conspiracy theories and bunk medical claims. The confusion, misinformation, willful ignorance, and faulty decision-making that results from poor communication – whether innocent or malign in intent – was on full display during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The travails of newspapers and other media outlets in recent decades has further undercut the flow of well-wrought science news. When I worked as a science and medicine reporter for The Baltimore Sun, that city’s major newspaper, I was part of a team of six reporters covering science and health news. After multiple rounds of downsizing, most of those positions and reporters have been eliminated from the paper.

In general, the quality and quantity of science coverage in the United States has dramatically declined. And it’s not just media coverage and public awareness of science that’s taken a hit. So, too, has the business of doing science. Federal funding for scientific research has steadily declined the United States in recent decades, the result of economic crises, the cost of waging multiple wars, paying for social programs for an aging population, and apathy or even open disdain towards science among politicians in charge of the federal government purse strings. As a result, scientists and research institutions have struggled to secure funding, and it has become ever more difficult for young scientists to establish themselves.

All this is to say that communicating the excitement, relevance, and need for science is more important than ever. There is a need for science communications just as there is a need for science.

No, the humble science writer isn’t going to prevent wars or shrink the federal budget deficit. But she can share scientific knowledge with the public, show how science leads to life-changing technologies and medicines, and argue the case, a story at a time, that supporting research pays dividends in economic, social, and personal well-being.  

The Golden Age of Science

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not all doom and gloom either. The power of science to improve people’s lives and tackle big problems has never been greater. We live in a truly remarkable era.

The reason for this, in a word, is technology. Technology gives us the power to know things and to do things. It gives scientists and engineers information that leads to new ideas. It gives each generation of scientists and engineers new tools to poke at dogma and revise or replace it with new ideas.

Consider the microscope. The first compound microscope was probably developed in the Netherlands in the 1500s, literally providing a tiny window into a previously unseen and unseeable world. By the 1700s, the resolving power of the microscope had improved to the point that Robert Hooke could begin studying individual cells. Cell theory, the assertion that cells are the fundamental units of life, has proven a particularly rich vein.

Next time you take a medicine, thank the inventor of the microscope, as our understanding of disease owes much to our ability to visualize cells. Nowadays, scientists can see individual molecules in action, opening yet another window into the microscopic – or should I say “nanoscopic”? – world. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has recently been awarded to three scientists for their work on super-resolution microscopy, imaging techniques pushing beyond theoretical limits on how small of an object we can visualize. 

Microscopy is just one of many technologies helping to advance science radically in recent decades. Supercomputers crunch vast amounts of data, allowing scientists to hear the voice of nature in all of its noise. The sequencing of the human genome provided biologists a copy of the operating instructions for the human body, a blueprint they are working feverishly to decipher.

The miniaturization of electronics and the connectivity of the internet and satellites allow various types of sensors to collect and transmit data in ways never before possible. A village-sized collider in Sweden lets us smash the tiniest subatomic particles apart so see what’s inside.

With so much happening so quickly, tales galore await the telling.

1. Popular science communications intended for a broad audience of non-specialists
2. Technical science communications intended for a narrow audience of insiders to a particular field

Science writing and communication are broad topics and it’s important to define our purview and a little about the approach I’ve taken on this website.

This website focuses on popular science communications, which I define as:

Communicating the significance of scientific research and technological innovation to non-specialists and specialists reading outside of their field of expertise.

My expertise and experience are mostly in popular science communications and the concepts and skills shared on this website fall into that category. I’ll go into a bit more detail below about the distinction between popular science communication and technical science communication.

It’s worth noting that science education materials are somewhat of an edge-case between popular and technical science communications. A book on the solar system for a 5-year-old leans towards popular science writing, while a college physics text book edges toward technical science writing (though it does the heavy lifting of explaining concepts and jargon along the way).

A quick aside: You’ll notice that I often use the word “writing” in referring to a broad range of communications mediums. Science stories are told through text, photos, video, infographics, sound recordings, and other multimedia. But as with a Hollywood movie, a written script is often the basis for audio and visual forms of communications in science.

In the worlds of public relations and journalism even photographers often portray their subjects based on a written story draft or note from a reporter/writer. To simplify the discussion, then, I will often use “writing” to refer generally to the core art of crafting a science, medicine, or technology story. 

Popular Science Writing vs Technical Science Writing

Popular science writing and technical science writing typically have different intended audiences.

The institutional purveyors of popular science stories range from media outlets like CNN and the New York Times to television networks like Science Channel or National Geographic to universities and non-profit research institutes such as MIT, Stanford, and Scripps Research.

These stories reach a broad audience with diverse levels of education and knowledge about science. An article on particle physics in the New York Times might be read by a Columbia University anthropology professor or by Times Square hotdog vendor, neither of whom has a deep understanding of quantum mechanics.

On the other hand, technical-scientific communication includes, among other things, scientists corresponding among themselves through scientific journals and meeting presentations, grant applications written to funding agencies, and reports of data from clinical trials to the Food and Drug Administration (the people who write these technical reports are typically referred a “medical writers” in job ads).

The highly technical language used in these “insider” venues allows experts to communicate precisely and efficiently – explanations of jargon and core concepts are dispensed with because the audience is familiar with the lexicon of the field.

While tremendously important, writing in this mode of communication is not the focus of this website – although technical science writing certainly wouldn’t suffer from applying some of the concepts you’ll find here. A well-written scientific paper, for instance, is more likely to get published than one that’s poorly written.

What is the Purpose of Popular Science Writing?

Organizations’ goals for creating and disseminating stories and information about science vary.

A CNN news spot hopes to entertain and inform to keep you tuned in to boost the network’s viewership and advertising sales. That university fundraising letter to alumni highlighting the fascinating research taking place at your alma mater hopes to inspire your support for the school and the research with a donation.

While these communications have different goals in mind, many of the same fundamental principles are necessary to communicate successfully in these different venues and towards various goals. Different needs and audiences require variations in messaging, tone, and medium, but at the core, they are variations on a theme.

Popular Science Communication Forms

Science communications come in a variety of packages. Here are just a few of the forms that science storytelling can take, in no particular order:

• News stories from journalistic media outlets
• University press releases organizations
• Industry press releases
• Social media posts
• YouTube videos
• Podcast episodes
• Magazine articles
• Fundraising letters
• University websites
• Presentations at events
• Documentary films

Conclusion

As you can see, the term “science writing” can be applied to many different forms and styles, from a Tweet to a 5000-word magazine article to a feature-length documentary.

But as I noted above, many of the core storytelling concepts apply to all of these different forms and intended goals. My plan is to share those core concepts with the intention of helping you become a science writer or grow your skills if you are already one.

The next article in this series is Why is Science Writing Important?