EGU Blogs

Journalism

Spice up your science with these 10 simple steps

April 28, 2014

What an awful title, eh. Well, you can avoid making this mistake! A recent Guardian post by Conversation UK’s Akshat Rathi (he’s popular on the blog today!) discusses some of the common mistakes in popular science writing and how best to avoid them. It’s fairly general, and by no means exhaustive, and mainly for more writing about science than science writing (er, the latter being formal publication in peer-reviewed journal, I guess).

But a more interesting recent find was a wonderful paper by Kaj Sand-Jensen from 2007 entitled ‘How to write consistently boring scientific literature‘,  all about, well, you guessed it, avoiding some common pitfalls when writing science articles. So in true Buzzfeed style, here are the top 10 tips of how to be a terrible science writer, with some personal comments after.

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Geoscience in the news

November 19, 2012

This is the fourth part of a series looking at how we should effectively communicate geoscience, based largely on a recent paper by Iain Stewart and Ted Nield. The previous post attempted to address the insanely impossible question of ‘who are the public?’, when it comes to public engagement’. It seems that this is very much a disciplinary issue, each with their own collective suite of hurdles and mountains to climb. The conclusion, I think, was that although identifying various ‘publics’ and sub-categories based on social traits, the use of this is only in identifying some sort of strategic framework for science communication to operate within, when what we really should be doing is ignoring that, and actually going out there and actually doing things. At the recent Festival of Geology in London, I saw kids (and adults!) having a blast playing with robotic trilobites. As a form of communication, I’d say doing practical things like that are infinitely more valuable than discussing which public group the trilobites are trying to commune with (as an example).

Almost as cool as this rideable trilobite!

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