A Field Guide for Science Writers (review)

Where are the boundaries between scholarly and popular publishing? Is a description of a new species of Australopithecus in Nature scholarly, yet a 'News and Views' article in the same journal and on the same find, but in a broader context, less so? And what of an essay on this discovery in a newspaper's Sunday supplement? Boundaries exist, but they are diffuse and flexible.

Many scientists with a research program based in the great outdoors, including me, use field guides as an introduction to some new research area. So A Field Guide for Science Writers seemed too good to be true - an introduction to an area of publishing largely outside my experience. This parallel culture is separate from yet integrated with (a cynic might say parasitic upon) scholarly publishing. It may worry some readers of this review that A Field Guide is not concerned with scholarly publishing per se, but it is directly concerned with publication of the results of academic research for broad consumption, and many of the numerous tips for authors have wider application.

A Field Guide is very well produced and logically arranged. Some of its chapters bear no relevance to any of my academic endeavours, yet even these made informative, even compelling, reading. The text is divided into a foreword, six parts (comprising forty-two chapters), an epilogue, and index. The quality of the text is uniformly high; whatever the style of a chapter, narrative, factual, or whatever, the authors provide adequate information on their subject to enable the reader to understand it and to make a critical judgement on its relevance to their own interests and intentions. Because the chapters are short, generally about six to eight pages, authors have limited space to explain their ideas and experiences, which makes the book lean and highly readable.

The first half of A Field Guide concerns nuts and bolts - parts consider 'Learning the Craft,' 'Choosing Your Market,' and 'Varying Your Writing Style,' followed by examples written by experts in contrasting fields and different work environments. The range of topics covered is broad, from 'Understanding and Using Statistics' (chapter 3) to writing for government agencies, publishing in popular magazines, and specializing in areas such as human genetics or space science. Rather than give a blow-by-blow account of this book, one chapter at a time, I have chosen to emphasize some of the chapters that I found particularly informative, entertaining, or both.

The first section, 'Learning the Craft,' includes some useful thoughts by several authors in chapter 4, 'Writing Well about Science: Techniques from Teachers of Science Writing.' This chapter includes many sound and sometimes innovative ideas for better writing in general. For example, Ann Finkbeiner proposes that readers need to be led by the hand through your prose and suggests that the way to convey difficult ideas and concepts is to start 'each sentence with the word or phrase that ended the previous sentence' (29). Simple, effective, and, as she notes, agreeing well with Strunk and White's principle of placing the emphatic word(s) of a sentence at the end.¹ Further, Finkbeiner's brief lists of phrases and words that can be deleted without loss of meaning also meets with my approval, but there are more, many more, that I might have included! John Wilkes recalls a memorable comment from an editor regarding over-explaining by his students: '[They are] very smart, but if you ask them what time it is, they tell you how the watch works' (32).

In the succeeding section, 'Choosing Your Market,' Carl Zimmer (chapter 13) discusses science books. Here he touches a raw nerve:

Love is crucial to writing books for three reasons. First, readers can tell when an author's heart isn't in the writing. Second, the book will be a dominant part of your life - from proposal to manuscript to publication - for at...