Science Writing for General Audiences

Hi everybody. My name is Kevin Folta. I am a professor at the University of Florida. And today we are going to talk about how we can distill scientific writing for general audiences. And this has been a really important topic as of late, mostly because scientists have been very insular over the years. We have kept our work in our own laboratories or in our own offices. And we haven't effectively disseminated our impacts to the public. And we sometimes wonder why people don't respect scientists, or maybe we don't have the funding we need, or the jobs we would like to have. And I think all of it goes back to we don't take the time to share what we find and what we do, and most importantly, why we do it. It turns out that we do some very good things for some very good reasons. That people would actually be really excited about if we took the time to tell them about it. One way we can do that is by writing for general audiences, and this is something we are also very uncomfortable with. So what I would like to take you through today are some of the things that I have learned mostly from boots-on-the-ground activity writing for science, but also things I have learned from learning about psychology, things I have learned from reading websites about how people think about content and how they read websites. All of this information together can help you better distill science and structure it in a way that is appealing to the reader. Why bother? As I mentioned before, we haven't necessarily been very good at tailoring our messages for general public. Yet the folks who really make a lot of pronouncements against science, whether it's climate or vaccines or genetic engineering, They're very good at manipulating this space. Scientists? Eh, not so hot. So there's that larger mission about why we should do it. Okay, that's— we've already established. But what about for you personally? What's in it for you? What's in it to develop your career? Well, I'm finding out that people who take the time to share the science from their laboratories or from, you know, from their own personal projects, They get some really great opportunities and doors opening when they share their work. It's important because if you can take a scientific article that's amazingly dense and break it down for the consumer in a very short 400, 600, maybe 800-word article in popular press, if you do that 12 times a year, once a month, You come out with 12 solid articles that you can now list in your CV, that now become part of your dossier, that now allow you to say, here's evidence that I'm interested in communicating with the public and sharing what we do. I think that really says a lot about you as a scientist. If you look at the applicants we get for, say, a faculty position or a postdoctoral position, the top people are solid. The top 10 are beautiful. They're all about the same. They all have grants and peer-reviewed publications, maybe some teaching experience. Here's an opportunity for them to separate themselves by spending an hour or 2 once a month sharing science with the public. So there's something in it for you too. And as I mentioned before, this is really a major problem because science is really doing great, but we're not bridging the gap to the public. And doing this kind of science communication is a really important way that we can do that. So what's the problem? Well, here's somebody reading a paper and having some thoughts, and she says, you know, this is great research. People are going to love this. But do you really think people are going to care about the esoteric activities of a peptide that binds a promoter inside a certain type of cell type to elicit a response? It's because what's fascinating to us as scientists isn't necessarily what moves the needle for the general public. Usually it's not. I think we know that pretty well. So think about it. Why— what makes you continue to read a website? What makes you continue to read a news article or a scientific paper? And they're all very different things. And for us as scientists, we get excited by the thrill of the chase, the discovery, something new, some new mechanism that adds resolution to the fundamental understanding of the building blocks of life. That's the stuff that gets us charged up. But that's not necessarily the case for the average person on the street. And that's one reason that there's a tremendous rift, is that when we write, we write for each other. We write using a scientific style and a scientific format, that tried and true introduction, results, materials and methods, discussion, whatever. Or, you know, maybe a little bit switched around. But you get the general idea. The idea is, is that we have a scientific formula for writing that scientists have used to communicate with other scientists. And this is what we were taught. And this is what's very effective in scientific writing. Unfortunately, that same sort of, you know, abstract, intro, materials and methods, results, discussion format doesn't translate to the general public. And maybe that's a way when— reason why when I ask scientific writers or writers who want to write for general public, when I ask them to write for general public and take a very complicated topic in a very dense scientific journal, usually what I get is a shorter version of that dense scientific story. It can't be that. Instead of talking about why and when and who did it, We need to talk about why it's important, not just who did it, what they did. We have to talk about why it's important. And that's one of the big differences. And we'll talk about that in a second. It all happens because of this thing in our heads, this human brain. Scientists have strange brains. And I think most of us would agree upon that, is that we synthesize information differently than most people do. We process information quite differently. And this was really revealed in part part by the book by Dan Kahneman. Dr. Kahneman talks about thinking fast and thinking slow, the brain being broken down into the fast part and the slow part. And if you look at this fast part of the brain, which he refers to as System 1, it's emotional and reactive, it's irrational, it's the part of the brain that moves very quickly. This is the part that we need to be tagging when we're trying to get somebody into our reading and urge them to read further. But what do scientists do? Well, we operate in System 2, in this very logical, strategic, slow, calculating— that's the part of the brain where we're most happy. This is the one we've been encouraged to develop and the one we've been able to develop expertise in communicating out of System 2. So when scientists speak to scientists, we're very comfortable using System 2 thinking. And this is how all of our scientific conferences and abstracts That's how it's all laid out. System 2. But our audience is somewhere in System 1. We have to appeal to that emotion. We have to give them an example of why the science is important, not just that it— trust me, I'm a scientist, this is something you'll love. Honestly, we got to do a little better than that. And so here's how we do it. Why do people stop reading websites? And so if we're starting to distill science for a public audience, we have to think about that. We know that 33% of readers just spend a few seconds actively reading a blog post. And so as we begin to write for different outlets, even if it's a blog on your LinkedIn page, whether it's an article on Medium or The Conversation, we have to be aware of what are the pitfalls, what are the mistakes we make and the holes we step in, and how do we navigate around them? And that's what I'll talk about for the majority of today's presentation. But the basic idea is that people say, I'm too impatient. I need to find quick answers. It's a reason many people find information on the web. The next one is I find the text too long to bother. I lose interest in what I'm reading. It's poor layout of this article or formatting. It's difficult or confusing to read. I don't trust the website or some other reason. Now, in our discipline, in science, if we are trying to publish our content on places that are relatively reputable, on places like The Conversation, Medium, LinkedIn, RealClearScience, Genetic Literacy Project, these are great places for us to show our science. And since those are already established, we can automatically eliminate some of these reasons why people turn away from websites. We can actually really just blame ourselves for these 3, maybe 4 categories, right? It's too long to bother, we lose interest in what we're reading, or difficult and confusing to read. These are things we can control. Layout, all that other stuff, that's on the website side, and those websites have very good layout and presentation already. What we have to worry about is how to work on the content. And those are all things we can manage. So why do people stop reading? And if we look at some of the good examples, well, one of the main reasons is how we write, especially as scientists, is not compatible with how people read on the web. And think about that. It's almost like writing a foreign language. We're using maybe the same words, but we have to put them in a very different order and in very different contexts. And there's some very important points that we'll make as we go forward in today's presentation. There's an idea of the iceberg model, and this is one strategy you can use with hypertext and footnotes, maybe even hyperlinks in some cases. But what this does is it takes a tremendous amount of content out of the article itself and buries it underneath an expandable clickable hyperlink. So in other words, you may have some minutiae that may be important to some readers but not all readers in order to understand the content of the piece. You can use a hypertext link to be able to direct people to content that want more but take it away from people who don't want to see large barriers of blocks of text. You can really make a 3,000-word article into about 400 words using these types of strategies. The other type of content to focus on are the types of words you're using. And the next quotation comes from— I think is a very important one— that the chances of individual word being fixated on depends upon whether it's a content word or function word. Content words are the words that are critical to the story. The functional words are just words that glue them together. And so really helping content words stick out and using strong content words is a critical part of our scientific writing when we distill it for a public audience. In addition, there's a really good opportunity that I look at every sentence I write, and in this one it says, in addition, comma. Rethink anytime you use a comma to offset text. I find that you can eliminate anything before the comma and usually not affect the meaning of that sentence. And this is a perfect example. Instead of putting in addition, I could have just said rethink anytime you use a comma to offset the sentence. I would have lost the fun irony, but I would have gotten the same message out to you. The big issue in losing interest comes from a variety of places, and we can talk about that. The way that we initiate interest is with a very strong headline. And I think it is extremely important to spend a lot of time thinking about that headline. The next part is big hooks, and we will talk about this more at the end as we talk a little bit about structure. But the big deal here is a strong headline and a complementary subhead, something that grabs the reader and says, I want you to read more. I usually like a headline that opens up some sort of question or some sort of intriguing finding. Suggesting that there is something to discover as you read through the text. Then I use the subhead to really develop that thought. If you read any of my pieces on Medium, it typically follows that kind of structure. It needs to grab the interest. You can use statistics. You can use any types of very personal, relatable information that tells the person that this article is important to them. Focus on why. Think about your audience and your audience's core values. What is it that the audience will find appealing about this particular article? In distilling science for the public, we want to get away from the scientific details and ask the question, why does it matter? Why does it— why is it important to me? Why is it important to my family? These are the questions that will help a reader move forward. The next big question is a little bit debatable, and this really comes from the question of journalistic style. Now journalists use the inverted pyramid for newspaper articles, and the idea is put the most important information up front and follow it by a descending set of less important information. It's all about how we structure this, and again, using those attention-getters up front. In the newspaper business, they'll call this the lead, the L-E-A-D. The lead is always starting in front, and the phrase don't bury the lead means don't put the most important information or the real hook somewhere down inside the story. Get it out front. The problem with that in the context of the modern web is that if you put the information all up front, that usually is a cue for your reader to leave. So other important information and supporting information may never be discovered. So people inside the web who think about this stuff in marketing think about a kind of a hybrid model. And what they suggest is the idea of using this hypertext, other text that's supporting with the most important information and other information that can be found either through hypertext links or hypertext links or hyperlinks. This is an easy way to further develop a good solid structure that people will find intriguing and will stay with as they begin to continually parse your article. The other big part of structure, think about the use of a nut graph. Now again, that journalistic term, and this is all about, usually follows the lead, talks about who, where, when in standard journalism. And in science distillation and science translation for general audiences, this is the kiss of death. The reason is, is because it puts the dry scientific information up front. Who did it? What institution are they at? And, you know, what did they do? Meh, not so exciting. What's important is why did they do it? Why did this team of scientists find it compelling to genetically engineer rice with proteins that could be directed against the HIV virus? This is important information. Why is it critical? That's important. And then you can put somewhere, dash it in as you go along, little bits about who it was and where they did it. Those are all excruciating minutiae that no one's going to worry about too much. And at the end of your article, you want people walking away with a sense of why it's important, not necessarily what university did the big breakthrough, because that information is fleeting and really doesn't matter. Think about why. Why should readers care? Why is it important to them or their families? It usually can relate to their values. Why is it important to satisfy their core interests and their core values? That's really important. And can you even develop a small graphic that can really hook them based upon the values and the basic information of why it's important to them? Define the problem, or some people say, dig a hole before you try to fill it. I think that is an important part of the distillation for science or the science translation. Really important. The other big issue is understanding how readers behave and how readers read a website. And along the lines of losing interest in what I am reading, think about your structure again based upon how readers read. And what you are seeing on the left is a heat map of how readers parse an article. They start at the left and move to the right in what's typically called an F pattern. The red is where people spend more time, the blue is where they spend less time, and this is a measurement of eye tracking on the article. How we can get around to be more effective in the idea of structuring our work so that readers spend more time on it is by signposting. Use headings that are descriptive. Use— not just are descriptive, but catchy. Really think hard about what those headings can be. Short paragraphs that are concise ideas. People are intimidated by big blocks of text. And I find that if I'm writing for a book or I'm writing for a magazine, I might write in 4 or 5 sentences that create a well-developed paragraph that has a beginning and an end and some sort of a thesis. For the web, it's different. You have to leave lots of white space. What you need to do is short, punchy paragraphs that keep the reader's attention. Use bold type to continually emphasize those action words. What are the content words that really are critical to the meaning of that story? Use bold type, maybe even bold italics, Bold is always better than italics in my estimation. Bold italics can be saved for those especially punchy times. Make sure you are offsetting critical content words that need to be part of that F-pattern as the reader is parsing your work. Remember, you are going to have readers, scanners, and parsers, or what do they call them all? Readers and scanners basically, who are just kind of skimmers, who are moving quickly through your website. You want to be able to capture their attention as long as you can. The next point is, is it intuitive? And this is a tremendous oversight that we make as we begin to edit our work. As we are translating scientific information for a general public, we tend to forget the value of analytical editing. Now, we are very good at mechanical editing, and that is what scientists do all the time. Is the grammar correct? The spelling correct? Punctuation in the right place? That's easy to do. Analytical editing is saying, what if we move this paragraph up here? Does this sentence actually do anything for me? Does this word give as much action as it needs to do? Can I change all my verbs from is, are, has been to words that have more visual meaning and more sense of action? This is how we need to be thinking about our editing. Can we take away the dryness of scientific writing and punch it up by making it work, making it flow better with more meaningful words? Then the other idea of using offsets, keeping readership attention by having parts of the text moved into offset boxes or pulled quotes, pull quotes. Grabbing those from the text, placing them somewhere else inside the article. Those can be very useful in holding a reader's attention. The other one is judicious use of hyperlinks. Using hyperlinks to lead readers to more important information, not necessarily putting all of our definitions inside the text. Keeping it short and concise and holding the reader's attention. One way to do this is to also think about how people are motivated in general. And Monroe's Motivated Sequence is an incredibly important persuasive tool to help us understand how retailers, other types of sales organizations, push their information to us. And they do it with this very simple formula. There's a hook that engages attention. This is that upfront attention-getter, the statistic, the funny story, the relatable personal tale that makes someone pay attention. There's creating a need. And this is a very important part of this equation that we sometimes overlook. Can we create a need for the solutions that you're going to present? In scientific writing, again, we present solutions but don't always explain why. Why is there a need to create the solution that we have? Then we show the solution. What is the solution that's been proposed by the authors in the original text? And then we show a visualization of how that solution can change or satisfy the need. How does it change the situation? How does it help us meet our values? And then the final part is maybe some action, next steps, or things that you can do, or some— something that a reader could do that would help forward the story. So this is Monroe's Motivated Sequence. It's frequently used in persuasion, and now that you know it, you'll see it sticking out all the time in politics, in business, in advertising, marketing. It's everywhere, and not necessarily always the most appropriate for science. It's one that I use in grant writing all the time, And certainly one that I think we can adapt to our science communication efforts. So one last part here is a difficult or confusing to read article is immediately turned away. And this is very true. Your reader will turn it off or will change pages the second they find something unclear. People are not interested in ambiguity. Keep your language simple and avoid $10 words. Now, I have a student who's an excellent writer, has great command of language, but he tends to try to use language that sounds very high-end and erudite but actually detracts significantly from the relatability of his text. And remember, we're talking to the average person, we're talking to politicians, we're talking to kids who are trying to get interested in science. Keep the language simple. Keep it vivid. Keep it visual. But keep it simple. In scientific translation, you need to clarify any term that can derail the reader. So even something as simple as DNA, you have to at least provide a hyperlink to what DNA is before the reader will find it useful. Useful. You don't want to leave anybody hanging, but providing too much detail and information is another way to turn them off. So there's a happy medium there that hyperlinks can help solve. So the main idea here is for you to build an audience, because experts in the internet and experts in advertising will tell you that the most valuable audience is one that continues to come back. And you'll continue to have repeated visits to your page if people find something of value. This is achieved in a couple of different ways. You have to be consistent. That's publishing something on a very regular basis, whether it's once a day, once a week, or once a month. Another way around that is by sharing good content on a daily basis with your stuff sprinkled in at your once a week, once a month interval. The idea is, is to always become a trusted source of information for somebody who's going to be following you potentially and looking for more content from you. The other way to do this is to increase your discoverability. You have to have other links through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, uh, whatever social media platform you prefer to share your information. Cast a wide net to find more readers who might be interested in reading and eventually following your content. Another important point from some experts that study these things is that visitors who read an article for 3 minutes return twice as often as those who read for 1 minute. And what this means is that the things we talked about earlier about important headlines, good solid subheads, obvious intention getters, big hooks, obvious structure— these are so important to maintaining that reader because it will help you build an audience. And finally, the conclusion is very important. So the beginning and the end are important. And even though only a subset of readers will get all the way to the end, it's an important way for you to put a bow on it. Show your readers that you care about the continuity and that this is just one piece in a series of pieces. That your next work will continue to provide that same end-to-end powerful content that you will find appealing. Inside that they will find appealing and useful to explore in your future work. So that's all I'll present today, and hopefully I've compelled you to think about the way you write for a scientific audience in a slightly different way. It's not just taking a scientific work and making it short. It's about completely rearranging this dense scientific topic and making it fit an audience and the format that they consume modern media. All of this needs to be done following that discrete set of rules in order to keep them hanging on and continue to read your work. Thank you very much for listening. I'm Kevin Folta, and this is all of my contact information here on this slide. Listen to the Talking Biotech podcast, which is a weekly podcast talking about an interesting area of biotechnology. And how it affects issues in agriculture and medicine. Thank you very much for listening, and thank you very much for watching.