Staying Afloat in the Rising Tide of Science

As a science writer, I often start my day with some words from scientists. Sometimes those words are in a new scientific paper. But very often they come in other forms. I check my RSS reader for new blog posts from scientists such as paleoanthropologist John Hawks and virologist Vincent Racaniello. I check in on Twitter, where geneticist Daniel Macarthur may point to an interesting new study or dispense some snark on a hyperventilating newspaper article. If I’m feeling a deep urge to procrastinate, I may head to YouTube to watch cosmologist Sean Carroll explain the arrow of time. When that’s over, I may glance at the podcast app on my phone to see if there’s a new episode of Story Collider—a series made up mostly of scientists telling stories before a live audience. As I listen, I might get distracted by a thump outside the front door: a review copy of a new book written by a scientist—perhaps Frans de Waal writing about animal cognition or Bryan Fry writing about snake venom.

It wasn’t always like this. When I started my career in the early 1990s, few scientists showed much interest in engaging with an audience, unless it was a group of scientists at a conference or a herd of undergraduates in a lecture hall. I asked some of them about their disinterest, and they told me that they didn’t see communicating science to the public as part of their job description. They viewed science as a kind of monastic occupation, separate from worldly affairs. There may have been other scientists who yearned to communicate with the public, but in the early 1990s they had very few options. They might try to submit an essay to the handful of magazines that would consider writing from a scientist. Television and other forms of media were simply off limits to scientists, unless their name was Carl Sagan.

Many factors have brought us from there to here. Advances in technology turned the Internet into a public square. Scientists no longer had to wait for permission to be published; they could start a blog or plunge into social media. Professional-quality cameras and microphones made it possible for scientists to record their own videos or podcasts.

Those tools would have lain idle if scientists didn’t develop a strong urge to use them. I first became aware of that urge in the early 2000s, when I started reading blogs by scientists. In many cases, their posts were fueled by frustration. They would read misleading coverage in newspapers and magazines and feel the urge to set the record straight. As a journalist, I greatly appreciated these blogs; they made me keenly aware of the hidden traps of our profession.

Frustration was not their only motivation. They also wanted to share their science with the rest of the world—a noble undertaking sometimes given the dreary label of “outreach.” In 2007, I began to observe this passion up close when I was asked by the Yale Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department to design a short science-writing workshop for graduate students. At first we thought a handful of students would register. Instead, over fifty people signed up. I’ve taught the workshop every year since, and that level of enthusiasm has not shown any sign of flagging.

These budding scientists, I’ve found, are motivated by a mix of joy and fear. They want other people to understand what it is about a subatomic particle or a particular species of tree frog that inspires them to dedicate their lives to understanding it. At the same time, many of them worry that their very survival as scientists depends on helping the public understand the value of their work. They can see how politicians advance their careers by claiming that basic scientists waste public funds or by accusing climate scientists of outright fraud (Roberts, 2015). No longer can they sequester themselves in their labs and field sites, unconcerned with what happens in the outside world.

Whatever their intentions may be, however, scientists cannot simply wake up one morning and decide to create the next Lives of A Cell. Writing about science (or drawing science animations or recording science podcasts) is a skill that takes time to develop. Of course, all scientists do a lot of writing, in the form of scientific papers, grant proposals, and lecture notes. But there are some important differences between scientific writing and the kind of writing other people actually want to read when they are perfectly free to do something else with their free time.

We can start with the individual words that we choose. Scientists learn to rely on technical jargon, and for very good reason: it’s an efficient way for two people steeped in expert knowledge to discuss complex concepts. But jargon becomes a hindrance when scientists try to communicate with anyone else—even other scientists. How many biochemists understand the jargon of astrophysics, or vice versa? “Readers can be very clever,” observes the biologist Robert Dunn, “but it is not their job to know all of the words that you and the twelve people you call colleagues made up” (Dunn, 2013).

Some scientists have bristled when I’ve suggested they step away from their jargon. They’ve retorted that it’s condescending to the reader, who can always look up an obscure word in a dictionary. I think they overlook just how much knowledge is bundled up in the jargon of science. If readers need to look up ubiquitination, they will learn that it’s an enzymatic process that involves the bonding of an ubiquitin protein to a substrate protein. They may need then to look up ubiquitin—and perhaps even substrate. Instead of sending a reader back and forth through a dictionary, writers ought to help a lay reader develop an admiration for the marvel of ubiquitination—the way in which cells can destroy themselves so as to rebuild themselves anew. Rather than rely on jargon, in other words, writers should try to unfold concepts for their readers.

Jargon is the most obvious manifestation of a broader challenge in science writing: making sense. In his recent book The Sense of Style, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker warns scientists of something he calls the Curse of Knowledge. “The main cause of incomprehensible prose,” he writes, “is the difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know something that you know.” This curse applies not just to the individual words that people choose, but the ways in which they structure explanations and entire narratives. It’s incumbent on writers to be always mindful of the reader and the fact that the reader cannot gain access to their brains. All a reader can rely on are the words on the page.

It can be tempting to respond to the Curse of Knowledge by burying readers in information. If there’s something unclear in a story, just add another paragraph. But more information does not equal more insight. In fact, a lot of the information people usually add is only loosely connected to the main point of their piece. The best cure for the Curse of Knowledge is to take precisely the opposite strategy. Writers should ask themselves, what is the bare minimum that they need to include in a piece for it to work? To answer this question, writers need to figure out what their piece is about—what story they are trying to tell. Once they identify that, everything else can fall away.

I’m always happy to talk to scientists about these matters. But recently I’ve gotten a bit leery about just how far their enthusiasm for communication is getting. I’m noticing a trend in pieces with headlines such as “Why Scientists Should Write for the Public” and “Science and the Public: Why Every Lab Should Tweet.”

Note the use of the word should.

That word transforms a voluntary act of joy into a dreaded mandatory task. Expecting all scientists to engage with the public non-stop also ignores some fundamental facts about science communication in the twenty-first century.

For one thing, your average reader is drowning in an ocean of things to read, watch, and listen to. A professional science news site like Scientific American or Nature may pump out a dozen pieces of original reporting every day. If you want to watch TED talks about science, there’s well over 100 hours of video waiting for you. While I enjoy learning about scientific developments on Twitter, there are moments when I look away from the stream of tweets and realize to my shock that my morning has vanished.

There’s a parallel explosion taking place in the scientific literature. By one estimate, global scientific output is doubling every nine years. PubMed added 698,051 papers published in 2005. In 2015, it added 1,213,348. That translates to a new paper coming out every 26 seconds. Even if I were to spend my entire working day with the words of scientists, I wouldn’t be able to learn about more than a minuscule fraction of the research coming out each year.

The push to capture the public’s scarce attention brings with it the risk of hype. Hype is already a serious problem in science journalism, and there are worry signs that it’s infecting scientific publications as well. One 2015 study found that the frequency of positive-sounding words like “amazing” and “unprecedented” has increased almost nine-fold in the titles and abstracts of papers published between 1974 and 2014 (Ball, 2015). It would be a shame for scientists to add to the hype by crafting clickbait.

None of this should scare away scientists who want to follow in the footsteps of Peter Medawar or Neil deGrasse Tyson or Emily Graslie. If they feel this calling, they should follow it. But they should do so while being mindful of the cacophonous world in which we all move today.