... fer-
tilize and weed. There is work to be done. But the work pays
off biggest when the plants are right for the soil and micro-
climate of the particular garden.
Is there some subject or writing style ... feels awful—until the next
day, when I would arrive at the of ce and see that, actually,
the work was not so bad. So I’d patch and polish (always
fun, the exercise of...
... calculated all kinds of things with this theory. The first
thing I calculated was the rate of disintegration of the
muon and the neutron. They should be connected to-
gether, if this theory was right, ... it
were the Holy Grail—always sought, often glimpsed,
never within reach. Scientific truth is always partial.Yet,
for the most part, the best scientists agree on the cur...
... intentionally left blank
Mastering the Craft of Science Writing
into
words
ideas
Elise Hancock
Foreword by
Robert Kanigel
THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS Baltimore & London
For my father,
who would ... Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hancock, Elise.
Ideas into words: mastering the craft of science writ...
... education, or interest in it.
Science writers and editors needn’t start off knowing
much science. Some of the best of them do, but some of the
best of them don’t. They must, though, be able to ... today about writing, espe-
cially writing about science, medicine, and other difficult
subjects, I learned then. Others did, too. Those who came to
see the ceaseless flow of red...
... the ma-
A Matter of Attitude
Only connect.
—E. M. Forster,
Howards End
terial as they do with the readers. Indeed, their curiosity and
its fruits are a large part of what the reader senses, of ... always have the reader in mind, not only as they write
but also in the finding out that comes before. They do
their research with integrity, digging deep, and they write
with the...
... parties,
people often tell me that they have decided they want to be
writers, and they’ll get started as soon as they have more
time, or when they have their study fixed up, or when they
get a new ... of Being that in
turn gives rise to appropriate Doing.
You can spot the best mentors, like the best parents and
the best shrinks, because their former protégés are out there
doing the w...
... on.
Another whole class of story ideas arrives from the other
direction: from outside the world of research, in the form
of a question, observation, or piece of news.To under-
stand the phenomenon then ... scientists,
Finding
Stories
33
as for the rest of us, ideas spark each other off, showing their
full size only as they connect. Sometimes it’s hard to know
what you thin...
... needs. For example: the
Insured, the Uninsured, the Doctor, the Insurance Company,
the Taxpayer, the Hospital, the Residents and Medical Stu-
dents, the Medical Teachers, the Makers of Medical Parapher-
nalia ... Each party brings special expertise
to the table .The science writer knows how to translate
science for the public, while the scientist knows the sci...
... Guaranteed, there must have
been other ways to approach the issue, so what was the advan-
tage of this one? The answers are always part of a larger pic-
ture, about either the science or the research ... folks, too. The
researcher will not mind. In fact, the better the scientific
team, the more the leaders seem to want to credit the junior
Research
and the
Inter...
... inter-
views, the machine took enough attention that my rapport
with the other person suffered, plus I often lost track of the
content. The problem is that, when I’m typing at the speed
of speech, the ... questions and find out the
answers; you ponder some more.
A period of wandering in a formless void is necessary to
any writing of substance, simply as part of achi...