These are notes for a class called “Writing about Science, Medicine, and the Environment,” which I have taught for several years at Yale. I update them here from time to time. They are published under Creative Commons Licence (CC BY-NC-ND)
WRITING THE STORY
Stories should come out of your reporting, not out of the Internet
For a typical profile or feature, your research should include a mix of the following:
—In-person reporting
—Interviews (in person or remote)
—Information from research papers, books, and reliable websites.
You should put the first two of these ingredients in the foreground. The other information you collect—to understand the historical background of your story, the foundational concepts, the relevant statistics—can also make it into your stories, but it needs to stay in the background. That’s because you are writing stories, not term papers. Your stories should contain vivid, personally observed details of people, places, and things. And those details should be there because they propel your narrative, not merely because you found them interesting.
Choices
To write a story, you have to make choices.
One choice is what your story will be about. If you are interested in a subject—say, climate change—there are a vast number of stories to tell about it. You may be surprised at how far you have to narrow your focus before you get a compelling, sharply defined narrative.
Let’s say you narrow down from climate change in general to someone who’s doing important work on how to fight it. You choose to write a story about that person. But you will probably need to narrow that choice further. That person may have several different projects underway at once—perhaps on carbon capture, geoengineering, modeling of clouds, and so on. Those different parts of this person’s life may not add up to one coherent story. If you try to write about them all, you may end up with a scrapbook of disconnected anecdotes. You may need to zero in to just one thing in their life—what you consider the most interesting or significant of all the things they do. The other things should then sink into the background. It’s your choice.
Making that choice requires a judgment about what you consider most important in their work. That may feel uncomfortable. You may think, who am I to be passing judgment on people with a lot more experience than I have? You can answer that question this way: a story without judgments isn’t much of a story at all.
Some stories require additional judgments. If you write about a program to get lead paint out of houses, it’s not enough to dutifully explain the details of its funding and implementation. So what? Why should a reader care? Is the program actually doing what it’s supposed to? Is it a triumph that should be emulated? Is it a failure? Is there room for improvement? You have to decide how you will answer such questions.
Of course, as a writer, you probably lack high-level expertise to judge the merit of a lead mitigation program. Fortunately, there are people who get paid to think all day about these issues. Find those outside experts, and get their help to form your own judgments. Once you reach those judgments, they will help you tighten your story into an even more compelling, focused narrative.
The first-person choice
Journalism and essays typically unfold in a third-person voice. Many students ask if they can write in the first-person instead. In some situation, that is a good choice—but only if the writer absolutely need to be a character in their story. If their experience is essential to the narrative, leaving themselves out makes no sense.
But deciding to write in the first-person is a serious choice that requires a complete follow-through. You need to inhabit a significant stretch of the story, rather than popping up unexpectedly halfway through and then vanishing without explanation a few paragraphs later. As a character, you have to have a three-dimensional presence, rather than drifting through like a zombie, with no inner emotional experience.
Stories take place in time
“Once upon a time” is a cliche, but only because every story is a journey through time. Indeed, time is what makes stories so powerful. We read novels that are chronological accounts of things that didn’t happen. We spend billions of dollars going to movie theaters to watch a chronological series of scenes in which fictional people fight on a fictional desert planet inhabited by giant fictional sand worms.
Of course, stories often do not follow an entirely strict timeline from start to finish. But readers need many clear markings to know where they are in time, and they need get clear time-shifting signals when you take a jump on the timeline. And they also need to see why you make every jump.
To give a simple example, here is a short profile I wrote of a biologist named Sara Lewis, who studies fireflies. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/science/30firefly.html
It does not begin with Lewis’s birth. Instead, it begins on an evening when I visited her in her home town. We spent the evening communicating with fireflies.
I describe the series of events that happened that night—in chronological order—and stop occasionally to explain the meaning of the mysterious flashes of light that we observed.
Then I jump back to 1980, to describe how Lewis first got obsessed with fireflies. After a digression into the 1800s to explain Darwin’s early ideas about such insects, I then move forward through Lewis’s career. I explain the link from each stage in her career to the next one, giving the reader a feeling of moving forward through her life.
Finally, I come back to the present day, Lewis having become a master of firefly communication, and we continue to talk to fireflies. I use the scene to bring up some of the questions now consuming her, and will continue to consume her in the future.
I make sure along the way that the reader does not get lost in time. I sometimes mention the year when things happen, or phrases like “This night” or “In recent years.” Even a phrase like, “and then” can help a reader follow you through time.
Remember that you can see your timeline clearly in your head, but readers can rely only what you put on the page.
Stories don’t require mind-reading
It’s not just the timeline that you alone can see clearly in your head. All the research you do for a story is accessible to you all at once. If you write some of it down on the page but leave things out, you can still understand it, because your expert mind will automatically fill in the gaps.
It can be hard to realize how much you’re filling in. It’s a journalistic equivalent of an optical illusion. And you may struggle even more to appreciate that your readers do not have access to all your research—and they cannot read your mind to get it.
Psychologists call this condition the curse of knowledge. Overcoming this curse is a big part of becoming a better writer. As you tell a story, think about what you can count on your readers to know already—the things you won’t have to explain. Now think about the things they don’t know.
If you’re writing about quantum computers, for example, your readers know what a computer is. But I’d bet they won’t know what a qubit is, despite the fact that it is the most fundamental, basic thing in the whole field of quantum computing.
More information is not the solution
It can be tempting to overcome the curse of knowledge with a surfeit of facts. The idea behind supplying people with a lot of details is that the more details appear in a story, the more a reader will understand.
This strategy is based on what social scientists have called the information deficit model of communication. As both a reader and a writer, I am here to tell you that this model is a recipe for failure.
The model confuses stories with textbooks and semester-long lecture classes. Readers may very well learn some interesting things from a good magazine feature, but they’re not going to come out of it Ph.D.-level experts. In fact, if readers start sinking into a quicksand of disorganized facts, they may very well stop reading.
Tedium is not the only flaw in stories produced by the information deficit model. They can also be unbearably long. They get that way because their writers believe that every additional detail makes a story even better. So there’s no upper limit to a story’s length. In fact, cutting is one of the most important parts of writing.
On many occasions I have encountered the information deficit model up close. I often get emails scientists upset about some widespread misunderstanding about an important issue (wildfires, vaccines, AI, etc.). These scientists decide they have to set the public’s understanding aright. They look at the Opinion section of the New York Times, and set out to write an op-ed that will fix the problem. They ask for my help.
The New York Times typically accepts opinion pieces that are only 800 to 1000 words long. No matter: the scientists write pieces that run 2000 or 3000 words. They send their pieces to me (despite the fact that I don’t work in the Opinion department), confident that soon they will endow expert-level understanding to the nation at large. I reply to these scientists with the email of an editor who handles such submissions. I also advise them they have to cut their pieces to fit. I often don’t hear anything after that.
Sometimes writers try to stay within a word limit, but still adhere to the data deficit model. Very often, they decide to cram as much information as possible into that finite space. Every phrase becomes packed with meaning, which readers cannot possibly unpack. Overall, the piece becomes as dense as a neutron star.
A better strategy is this: find the best story you can tell in the space you have available.
Don’t presume readers think just like you
As you think about your readers—what they know and what they don’t know, what they will find compelling and what will bore them—also think about the values they may have.
A lot of journalism has behind it a moral mission. Reporters want to tell stories that are important. Reading a story may improve people’s lives. It may lead to changes in law, shifts in political priorities, or improvements in how people treat each other or the environment. Essays, op-eds, and other opinion-based pieces can also change how people think, using rhetoric, storytelling, and argument.
In order to change minds and move readers, you must recognize that many of your readers may not think the way you do. They may not rank their values in the same order as you. Things that you take for granted as being important may not seem that way to many of your readers. This doesn’t make your readers monsters. In fact, if you dig down deep enough, you’ll find a lot of common ground between you and many of your readers. But if you presume to think for them, you may alienate them.
Overlooking these facts can lead writers to mistakenly assume their readers share all their own values and have reached the same conclusions about the issues they’re writing about. They end up preaching to the converted. If you’re writing about someone trying to make a city more “sustainable,” explain what you actually mean by that buzzword, and explain why it’s important. Do not expect such words to light up a whole network of meaning and values in the brains of your readers. They may not be familiar with the word, or they may not value it as you do.
Think instead about how you can form a meaningful connection through your writing, with your own humanity and the humanity of the people you portray.
Writing about people
It’s all too easy to forget that science doesn’t happen by itself. To say, “A study found that salt is bad for you,” is problematic. Studies don’t do anything. People run studies. And people find out things.
Interview people to understand their experiences as human beings. Scientists are not robots chunking out new bits of knowledge. Doctors are not packages of software spitting out diagnoses. Asking a simple question such as, “How did you end up spending your life studying quantum computers?” or “What was the most important experience you’ve had as a hospice worker?” can uncork powerful human stories.
Also remember that when it comes to science, medicine, and the environment, the people who you may write about can potentially include lots of people who are not themselves scientists. They may be patients struggling to get a diagnosis. They may be home-owners losing their life savings to climate-change driven floods. They may be people who start a political campaign.
Writing about people also makes your writing more compelling. It helps pull in readers who might not otherwise think that your subject is interesting. People like to read about people. To get readers to care about something — say, land snails — try to make them care about the people who care about land snails.
How do you make readers care about people? Students will often stick labels of them. They will declare that someone is brilliant, or passionate.
“Well, okay, if you say so,” readers may reply, with an inward sigh.
Readers don’t get much satisfaction out of simply relying on the writer’s word about the characters in a story. Demonstrating a person’s brilliance or passion in action will make a far deeper impression. It will also let you depict your subjects as unique people, not just one member of a group who all get the same label pasted on them.
Stories typically include a cast of several people. One or a few will be at the center of the narrative. A writer should introduce each of them with enough detail that we can tell them apart and remember them when they dip out of the narrative and then return. Stories also typically include minor characters who come into a story briefly and then exit. Don’t scrimp on them either. We don’t need the life stories of minor characters, but we will enjoy a few details that make them stand out as people too.
Quotes: Let your subjects speak
People speak, write, sign, or otherwise communicate. No story can make sense without some sort of communication. Imagine a novel where characters don’t say or think a single word. Imagine a movie without a line of dialogue. A reported story without any quotes can feel just as odd.
There are exceptions, of course — business analysis stories, for example, or short crime reports. But for the most part, stories need the spoken words of their characters. So quote people, quote them well, and quote them often.
It’s important to start putting quotes into a story as early as possible. An opening scene, for example, is a natural opportunity to introduce voices to the narrative. As you introduce a main character into a story, you can find a good quote from them that sums up an important aspect of the story to come.
If you wait till halfway or more through a story to start quoting people, it will be a disconcerting surprise. By then, readers will have come to assume that you’re telling a story without quotes. Why, after so many silent paragraphs, are you quoting people now?
When you go on reporting trips, listen to the people you’re with. Take notes when they say something funny or powerful or revealing. Think of questions that can lead people to answer in revelatory ways. Listen back to your recordings after the interview to grab compelling lines to include in your story.
Lots of quotes help a story, but they have to be good quotes–pungent lines that bring the speaker to life in the reader’s mind. The best quotes typically are one or two complete sentences. If you are tempted to drop a long quoted paragraph into your story, see if you can cut most of it away, telling most of the story in your own words and saving only the best part of the quote.
Likewise, avoid quoting sentence fragments. These make it harder for the reader to switch attention from the narrator’s voice to the subject’s voice.
If you’re narrating an event, set quotes off in their own paragraphs. It is confusing to read a paragraph in which a quote is wedged in the middle of exposition. It’s even more confusing to have two or more quotes from a person sprinkled in a paragraph. And quoting two or more people within one paragraph can be downright incomprehensible. Take a look at how fiction authors use dialogue in short stories and novels if you need a model.
Avoid adding words to quotes in brackets at all costs. Bracketed words intrude on a subject’s voice and spoil the poetry of a good quote. Pick sentences from your interviews that don’t require brackets to make sense. Alternatively, set up the quotes with exposition first, so that they will make sense in context. Only use brackets if they are absolutely essential—such as when you quote from documents or speeches.
If you are narrating an event you observed, model your quotes after novels and short stories. Fiction writers typically let lines stand alone as their own paragraphs, rather than burying them in paragraphs of exposition.
If you are incorporating quotes into exposition, it can be okay to fit them into bigger paragraphs. But be sure to have a good reason to quote someone in a larger paragraph, rather than just using your own words. Ending a paragraph with a salty quote can be particularly effective.
Quotes usually work best at the front of a sentence—just as in the case in novels and short stories.
Use this structure: “Use this structure,” Zimmer said.
Avoid this structure: Zimmer said, “Use this structure.”
For verbs, use “said,” “asked,” and other simple words. Avoid elaborate verbs that distract from the quote, such as “enthused” or “bemoaned.”
—Avoid an “unquote.” — i.e., Euclid explained that quod erat demonstrandum.
It feels odd to have a narrator tell us what people said, rather than quoting them directly. It’s as if the character is talking in another room. All we hear is muffled speech, with the narrator running in from time to time to let us know second-hand what they said.
STRUCTURE: A PARTS LIST
Up until now, I’ve discussed some of the big-picture elements of strong writing, such as choosing stories, telling stories through time, bringing people to life, and being seriously mindful of your reader. Now I’m going to turn to some of the fine-grained elements of strong writing. These are no less important. If your writing is riddled with jargon, for example, your readers will not be able to appreciate even the most extraordinary narrative.
Headlines and decks
If you have worked your way down to a particular story, you should be able to write an engaging, specific headline for it. If you find yourself struggling to get beyond hazy generalities, that may be a sign that the story itself needs more sharpening.
Avoid ending your headlines with question marks. The goal of your reporting is to come to some conclusions of your own on a subject. Readers are entitled to ask questions. As the writer, you have the job of offering them some answers.
Below a headline comes a sentence or two that provides a little more guidance to a story. I call it a deck, but it goes by other names, such as a subhead.
The deck should be brief—not a paragraph. The deck should be free of jargon. The deck, like the headline, should take the form of a declarative statement rather than a question. The ultimate function of the deck is the same as the headline: to make a browsing reader want to stop browsing and start reading the article itself.
Introductions and nut grafs
The introductory section of an article needs to give readers a sense of what the story will be about. As the radio producer Nancy Updike once put it, telling readers where a story is going doesn’t spoil the ending for them. It primes them for it. https://transom.org/2006/nancy-updike/
One reason it’s important to prime your readers is because you want to make sure they keep reading. Readers will glance over a headline and deck and start into the first few paragraphs of a story before committing to a piece. If they can’t figure out what the story is going to be about, they will find something else to read.
Remember, you’re not writing assigned homework. Readers can choose to not read your story at any moment.
Introductions often start with a well-chosen anecdote. For my own story on Sara Lewis, I knew that I had my introduction as soon as we started talking to fireflies in the twilight. I figured that readers would be surprised to learn that you can, indeed, talk to these insects. As you read a variety of stories, look at the introductions to get a sense of how different writers pick different points of entry into their stories.
Along the way in an introduction, it’s important to just come out and tell the reader, in a couple concise sentence, what story you are telling. Don’t leave it up to readers to guess. Journalists call this brief declaration the nut graf. Your nut graf should be intriguing, perhaps even surprising. If it states something most readers already know, they won’t feel the need to keep reading. If it is too obscure, readers won’t know why they should care enough to invest more time with your story.
It can be hard to craft a nut graf. After weeks of work, how can you boil down thousands of words to just a couple of sentences? But writers produce nut grafs for even the heftiest features. Atul Gawande’s magisterial New Yorker story “Letting Go” runs over 11,000 words. But he gives us the direction he will take the story with two sentences near the start of the piece:
“This is the moment in Sara’s story that poses a fundamental question for everyone living in the era of modern medicine: What do we want Sara and her doctors to do now? Or, to put it another way, if you were the one who had metastatic cancer—or, for that matter, a similarly advanced case of emphysema or congestive heart failure—what would you want your doctors to do?”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/02/letting-go-2
If you find yourself struggling to come up with a nut graf, that may tell you something important. You may not actually have a story yet. You may only have a topic. Think of it this way: Ebola is not a story. How health workers and scientists together stopped an Ebola outbreak is a story.
Once you have finished your introduction, including the nut graf, don’t forget it. Just the opposite: remember that you have now made a promise to your readers about what they will encounter in the rest of your story. Make sure that the rest of your story lives up to that promise. If you drift off into a different tale, your readers may feel like victims of a bait-and-switch. If you want to tell that different tale, rewrite your introduction to match.
History
Most stories require a little history—or a lot. A story on the resurgence of the New England oyster industry will benefit from a look back at how Native Americans ate oysters for thousands of years, and then how European colonists over-harvested them. A short profile of a psychologist studying the minds of dogs may only need a quick overview of some of the key ideas that previous researchers had, to set up the psychologist’s own work.
Writers often put some of this history right after the introduction, so that they can then dive deeper into the more recent events that are the focus of their story. Diving into history is a jump across your timeline, and so readers need a clear sense of why you’re jumping, and you then need to make it clear when you’re jumping back to the main narrative.
Scenes
Novels, short stories, movies, and plays are all organized around scenes — focused moments in which people do and say things that advance the overall narrative. As reporters, we don’t make up scenes. We reconstruct them from our reporting of real events.
In some cases, we write about scenes we observed ourselves. While planning out your research, think about the opportunities you can have to watch parts of your story unfold. There may be an event already planned (a demonstration, a trial, a game). Or you can arrange a scene yourself, such as asking an ecologist you want to profile to take a hike together so you can observe how they make sense of the natural world.
Some scenes took place long ago. You’ll have to piece them together from whatever evidence remains — memories retrieved in interviews, videos lingering on YouTube, diaries in university archives.
Before you add a scene to a story, make sure it matters. What event or point is it illuminating? If you cut a scene out, does the story still hold together? If story falls apart, the scene is essential. If it survives, then the scene is a digression. An unnecessary scene may be funny, cool, amazing. But it has to go.
When you open a scene, set it. Provide enough detail so that the reader knows where and when it’s happening. To make it evocative, take advantage of the cinematic power of our brains. Give readers things to see, hear, touch, smell. But make sure these sensory details are relevant to the story and not random details.
Find ways to convey the humanity of people in your scenes. Use their words, appearances, and actions.
Transitions
One of the most common notes I make on drafts is, “Why does this come next? I don’t seen the connection.”
Each section of your story should fit naturally in its place. Otherwise, your story may feel like a disconnected set of details, presented in no particular order. To help readers follow the flow of the narrative from section to section, build strong transitions that show the reader how one leads to the next. If you struggle with this task, it’s possible that the overall narrative arc needs some more work. One useful way to address this challenge is to ask yourself at the end of each section, “And then what happened?” Think about what needs to come next to move the story forward.
Conclusions
We’ve all read beautiful endings. But if someone asked you to describe what makes it good, you might struggle. I know I do. It’s hard to say why any particular good ending is good. It’s also hard to explain to students how to write a good ending. The Craft of Science Writing includes some interviews with writers about seeing out effective endings (2nd ed., p.246). I encourage you to read what they have to say.
Conclusions work well by echoing the beginning without simply repeating what you started with. They can feel like an upward spiral—circling the narrative back to the beginning, and yet reaching a higher place. Sometimes way to end a story is to quote some remarkable final words from an interview, summing up an experience or looking forward to what will happen in the future.
I started out in science writing at a magazine called Discover, and I learned a lot from a senior editor there at the time named Rob Kunzig. One particularly fine story he wrote, called “Between Home and the Abyss,” describes the emerging understanding of life at the bottom of the ocean through the story of an expedition led by Rutgers biologist Rich Lutz. Spoiler alert: the expedition did not go well.
My favorite part was the end, which captured the spirit of the whole piece in a name.
As Lutz sat in the officers’ mess that night, picking quietly at a late dinner, the ship was steaming toward the dock in Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River. There it would exchange Lutz and his colleagues for the next group of researchers. Landfall came just after dawn, at a forested spit of land squeezed between the surf line and a bank of fog. The place was called Cape Disappointment.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/between-home-and-the-abyss
Paragraphs and sentences
I am going to move now to the smaller parts of the a story, but just because they are small does not make them any less important.
Paragraphs, for example, are under-appreciated units of narrative — bigger than sentences but smaller than stories. Take full advantage of their power. Each paragraph should be placed in the right logical place in a story. The internal structure of paragraphs matters, too. In the first sentence, we should understand why it flows from the last sentence of the previous paragraph, and each subsequent sentence should also flow logically from the previous one. Each paragraph should have a unifying point. Don’t start talking about one thing at the outset of a paragraph and then slide into another topic midway through.
Sentences give stories their music. To vary their rhythm, choose sentences of different lengths. Find different structures—starting one sentence with the subject, starting the next one with a dependent clause. Keep a careful eye on each sentence’s structure. Don’t keep packing information into a sentence until it becomes an ungainly, paragraph-long mess. One way to judge the quality of your sentences is to read them aloud. Those ungainly sentences will make you run out of breath.
Avoid rhetorical questions. Readers will ask themselves questions about your story. It’s your job to answer those questions with a strong narrative, composed of declarative sentences.
Write sentences in the active voice, not the passive voice
The scientific community favors writing sentences in the passive voice. They shouldn’t, nor should you. The passive voice dissolves the power of narrative. It destroys the impact of action. It sows confusion about who did what. Sometimes the passive voice cannot be avoided. (See what I did there?) But for the most part you can find an active-voice alternative.
This is not a meaningless grammatical game. By making an effort to create active prose, you will end up discovering more about the actions — and the people behind those actions — that give power to your story.
Choose your words. Avoid jargon
Scientists invent words, which they use to talk to each other efficiently. But most people outside a scientist’s subspecialty have no idea what many of these words mean — including other scientists. Tritrophic, metamorphic, anisotropic — these are not the words to tell stories with.
Everyday language has a wonderful power to express the gist of scientific research without forcing readers to hack through a thicket of jargon. But there’s no algorithm you can use to determine what’s jargon and what isn’t. You need to develop your mind-reading abilities. Ask yourself if readers will know what you’re talking about. If you need help, find a friend who is not an expert on your story’s subject and conduct a little vocabulary quiz.
(I keep a running list of words I’ve encountered in assignments that are examples of unacceptable jargon: https://carlzimmer.com/the-index-of-banned-words-the-continually-updated-edition/ )
There may be times when you absolutely have to use jargon. These times are far rarer than you may think. If you choose to introduce a term, do not simply throw out it out in a sentence and then explain it later. Do the reverse. Until readers grasp the concept behind jargon, it acts as dead weight that pulls your story down into the murk of confusion.
Formality, jargon’s dangerous cousin
Even if you don’t use a single word of jargon, you can still use language in a way that’s confusing and unwelcoming. Scientists, for example, will sometimes say that a drug works “in mouse.” In is a familiar word. So is mouse. But “in mouse” only makes sense to certain scientists. The rest of your readers will have to struggle to figure out that you mean that the drug had promising results in experiments on lab mice. You want your readers flying forward, relishing your metaphors and dramatic turns. You don’t want them puzzling over obscure phrases and trying to guess their meaning.
Formality is also dangerous because it drains the passion from prose. It is entirely possible to let readers experience wonder, sadness, fear, outrage, and joy when reading about science — without sacrificing accuracy.
Abbreviations
In term papers and scientific papers, it is customary to introduce abbreviations in abundance. In everyday writing—essay, articles, opinion-pieces, etc.—abbreviations are a distraction and a cognitive burden. Let’s say you write “She is an advisor for the Regional Water Authority (RWA).” Then, two pages later, you refer to the RWA without the full name. You are implicitly expecting your reader to commit that meaning to memory when you first refer to RWA. But readers do not read to memorize. They read to enjoy a story.
Abbreviations can also be a cognitive burden. Every time you use one in your story, you are expecting your reader to commit its meaning to memory. Instead, your readers will stumble across the abbreviation and recall what it stands for. (“Wait…RWA stands for what? Oh, that’s right: Regional Water Authority.”) If you introduce several abbreviations, you make the burden even heavier.
Whenever possible, think about how you can avoid introducing an abbreviation. If you never refer to the abbreviated term again, then there is no point in introducing it. If you only use it once, perhaps you can get away with the full name. Perhaps you can find synonyms or other strategy to refer to the thing without having to repeat a long name or an abbreviation too often. Perhaps you can just refer to the thing by its abbreviation from the start (RNA or DNA, for example). If you absolutely must use an abbreviation repeatedly, help lessen the reader’s burden by providing quick clues to remind them what the abbreviation stands for.
Names
Introduce people with their full name. It’s standard to refer to them afterwards by their last name only. One exception to this rule is if you’re naming a child. For children, the rule is full name, then first name. You may also need to use first names if you’re telling a story about more than one member of the same family. If a source demands anonymity, you can refer to them with a pseudonym.
FACT-CHECKING
It’s all too easy to make factual mistakes in science writing. That’s because we deal in so many facts — from the number of insects on the Earth (about 10 quintillion) to the year in which Henrietta Leavitt discovered a pattern in the brightness of stars that made it possible to measure the size of the universe (1912). Fact-checking is essential to ensuring science writing is free of errors when it gets published.
Some publications assign professional fact-checkers to ensure an accepted story contains no errors. As the writer, you’ll be expected to provide all the guidance a fact-checker will need to efficiently ensure its accuracy. A typical list of things writers may supply includes recordings, transcripts, contact information for sources, and documents. In addition, writers supply an annotated version of their story so that fact-checkers can quickly zero on what they need to confirm each fact.
Many publications don’t have the resources to hire fact-checkers, unfortunately. In such cases, it’s prudent to do your own fact-checking. When you fact-check a story, do not simply send the manuscript to sources to look over. In doing so, you’re giving away the responsibility for the accuracy of the story to someone else. Sources may demand that you change a part of the story not because it’s wrong, but because they don’t like it. Sometimes people will object to being accurately quoted, for example, because it sounds unflattering.
You can fact-check with a source by talking over the phone, going over the facts in your narrative and in their quotes. You can review a transcript or a recording to double-check the wording of the quotes. If you can’t arrange a call, you can use email as a back-up. But it can be harder to follow-up by email if someone corrects you in an unclear manner.
In addition to sources, you can also use documents, videos, and other materials to check a story. It’s important to go as far upstream to authoritative sources as you can. Use journal papers and government web sites. Don’t use Wikipedia, and don’t use articles produced by other journalists. (For more on checking, consult The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking, by Brook Borel. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo194938501.html )
To prepare your stories for fact-checking, use footnotes. You don’t need to annotate a story for fact-checking with the same formality expected for term papers. You just need to provide guidance to a fact-checker. Did a quote come from an interview? If so, where and when did the interview take place? You don’t need to footnote every single quote from the same interview if you explain your reporting clearly in your footnotes. You also need to provide a fact-checker with your sources for numbers, descriptions of events, and so on. Don’t add links to the text. If your source is a webpage, put the url in a footnote.
(Thanks to guests who have visited my class over the years and helped shape my thoughts on these matters, including Joshua Foer, Maryn McKenna, Annie Murphy Paul, Michael Specter, Florence Williams, and Ed Yong.)