This week, graduate students in my course are learning how to write about science for the non-expert public.
For those of you who do this professionally, what tips would you offer?
I cap myself at one (maaaybe two if they directly contrast) new pieces of terminology per article/chapter/podcast episode, which should be:
a) the term that is the crux of the whole topic, not incidental background jargon
b) concept/meaning/motivation FIRST, technical term for it AFTER
Concept first, jargon second is from a biology pedagogy study but I refer to it constantly doing scicomm for linguistics
(Note that acronyms and symbols also count as jargon)
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26537537/
Oh, also, a lot of academics think they have to do scicomm on their own cutting edge research, when it is often more useful/effective to do scicomm on more foundational concepts/other people's research/a broader and more practical topic than a single narrow research paper
As a frustrated reader of a lot of science communication, thank you. “Here is one interesting paper” scicomm is only very rarely good journalism, no matter who does it. The unit of science publication is not shaped the same as the unit of newsworthiness, compelling narrative, or lay digestibility.
Deleting a snippy reply that I regret and replacing it with this: Yes, you’re right. But the virtues of good journalism and the virtues of good scicomm (at least the ones I want to highlight) happen to overlap in this situation.
I think your post is completely right. I also see a lot of people (including old me) assuming that Comm == Journalism, and had a relatively big time reporter shake this out of my head only recently!
