Take a class of writing students in a liberal arts college and assign them to write about some aspect of science, and a pitiful moan will go around the room. "No! Not science!" the moan says. The students have a common affliction: fear of science.
They were told at an early age by a chemistry or a physics teacher that they don't have "a head for science."
Take an adult chemist or physicist or engineer and ask him or her to write a report, and you'll see something close to panic.
"No! Don't make us write!" they say. They also have a common affliction: fear of writing. They were told at an early age by an English teacher that they don't have "a gift for words."
Both are unnecessary fears to lug through life, and in this chapter I'd like to help you ease whichever one is yours. The chapter is based on a simple principle: writing is not a special language owned by the English teacher. Writing is thinking on
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paper. Anyone who thinks clearly can write clearly, about any-thing at all. Science, demystified, is just another nonfiction sub-ject. Writing, demystified, is just another way for scientists to transmit what they know.
Of the two fears, mine has been fear of science. I once flunked a chemistry course taught by a woman who had become a legend with three generations of students; the legend was that she could teach chemistry to anybody. Even today I'm not much farther along than James Thurbers grandmother, who, as he recalled her in My Life and Hard Times, thought that "electric-ity was dripping invisibly all over the house" from wall sockets.
But as a writer I've learned that scientific and technical material can be made accessible to the layman. It's just a matter of putting one sentence after another. The "after," however, is cru-cial. Nowhere else must you work so hard to write sentences that form a linear sequence. This is no place for fanciful leaps or implied truths. Fact and deduction are the ruling family.
The science assignment that I give to students is a simple one. I just ask them to describe how something works. I don't care about style or any other graces. I only want them to tell me, say, how a sewing machine does what it does, or how a pump operates, or why an apple falls down, or how the eye tells the brain what it sees. Any process will do, and "science"
can be defined loosely to include technology, medicine and nature.
A tenet of journalism is that "the reader knows nothing." As tenets go, it's not flattering, but a technical writer can never for-get it. You can't assume that your readers know what you assume everybody knows, or that they still remember what was once explained to them. After hundreds of demonstrations I'm still not sure I could get into one of those life jackets that airline flight attendants have shown me: something about "simply"
putting my arms through the straps, "simply" pulling two toggle knobs sharply downward (or is it sideways?) and "simply"
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ing it up—but not too soon. The only step I'm confident I could perform is to blow it up too soon.
Describing how a process works is valuable for two reasons.
It forces you to make sure you know how it works. Then it forces you to take the reader through the same sequence of ideas and deductions that made the process clear to you. I've found it to be a breakthrough for many students whose thinking was disorderly. One of them, a bright Yale sophomore still spray-ing the page with fuzzy generalities at midterm, came to class in a high mood and asked if he could read his paper on how a fire extinguisher works. I was sure we were in for chaos. But his piece moved with simplicity and logic. It clearly explained how three different kinds of fires are attacked by three different kinds of fire extinguishers. I was elated by his overnight change into a writer who had learned to write sequentially, and so was he. By the end of his junior year he had written a how-to book that sold better than any book I had written.
Many other fuzzy students put themselves through the same cure and have written with clarity ever since. Try it. For the principle of scientific and technical writing applies to all non-fiction writing. It's the principle of leading readers who know nothing, step by step, to a grasp of subjects they didn't think they had an aptitude for or were afraid they were too dumb to understand.
Imagine science writing as an upside-down pyramid. Start at the bottom with the one fact a reader must know before he can learn any more. The second sentence broadens what was stated first, making the pyramid wider, and the third sentence broad-ens the second, so that you can gradually move beyond fact into significance and speculation—how a new discovery alters what was known, what new avenues of research it might open, where the research might be applied. There's no limit to how wide the pyramid can become, but your readers will understand the broad implications only if they start with one narrow fact.
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A good example is an article by Harold M. Schmeck, Jr., which ran on page 1 of the New York Times.
WASHINGTON—There was a chimpanzee in California with a talent for playing ticktacktoe. Its trainers were delighted with this evidence of learning, but they were even more impressed by something else. They found they could tell from the animal s brain whether any particular move would be right or wrong. It depended on the chimpanzee s state of attention. When the trained animal was properly attentive, he made the right move.
Well, that's a reasonably interesting fact. But why is it worth page 1 of the Times? Paragraph 2 tells me:
The significant fact was that scientists were able to recog-nize that state. By elaborate computer analysis of brain wave signals they were learning to distinguish what might be called
"states of mind."
But hadn't this been possible before?
This was far more ambitious than simply detecting gross states of arousal, drowsiness or sleep. It was a new step toward understanding how the brain works.
How is it a new step?
. The chimpanzee and the research team at the University of California at Los Angeles have graduated from the tick-tacktoe stage, but the work with brain waves is continuing. It has already revealed some surprising insights to the brains behavior during space flight. It shows promise of application to social and domestic problems on earth and even to improvements in human learning.
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Good. I could hardly ask for a broader application of the research: space, human problems and the cognitive process. But is it an isolated effort? No indeed.
It is part of the large ferment of modern brain research in progress in laboratories throughout the United States and abroad. Involved are all manner of creatures from men and monkeys to rats and mice, goldfish, flatworms and Japanese quail.
I begin to see the total context. But what is the purpose?
The ultimate goal is to understand the human brain—
that incredible three-pound package of tissue that can imag-ine the farthest reaches of the universe and the ultimate core of the atom but cannot fathom its own functioning.
Each research project bites off a little piece of an immense puzzle.
So now I know where the chimp at U.C.L.A. fits into the spectrum of international science. Knowing this, I'm ready to learn more about his particular contribution.
In the case of the chimpanzee being taught to play tick-tacktoe, even the trained eye could see nothing beyond the ordinary in the wavy Unes being traced on paper to represent electrical waves from an animals brain. But through analysis by computer it was possible to tell which traces showed that the animal was about to make the right move and which pre-ceded a mistake.
An important key was the system of computer analysis developed largely by Dr. John Hanley. The state of mind that always foreshadowed a correct answer was one that might be described as trained attentiveness. Without the computers
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ability to analyze the huge complexities of the recorded brain waves, the "signatures" of such states could not have been detected.
The article goes on for four columns to describe potential uses of the research—measuring causes of domestic tension, reducing drivers' rush-hour stress—and eventually it touches on work being done in many pockets of medicine and psychology.
But it started with one chimpanzee playing ticktacktoe.
You can take much of the mystery out of science writing by helping the reader to identify with the scientific work being done. Again, this means looking for the human element—and if you have to settle for a chimpanzee, at least that's the next-high-est rung on the Darwinian ladder.
One human element is yourself. Use your own experience to connect the reader to some mechanism that also touches his life. In the following article on memory, notice how the writer, Will Bradbury, gives us a personal handle with which to grab a complex subject:
Even now I see the dark cloud of sand before it hits my eyes, hear my fathers calm voice urging me to cry the sting away, and feel anger and humiliation burn in my chest. More than 30 years have passed since that moment when a play-mate, fighting for my toy ambulance, tossed a handful of sand in my face. Yet the look of the sand and ambulance, the sound of my father s voice and the throb of my bruised feel-ings all remain sharp and clear today. They are the very first things I can remember, the first bits of visual, verbal and emotional glass imbedded in the mosaic I have come to know as me by what is certainly the brains most essential function—memory.
Without this miracle function that enables us to store and recall information, the brain s crucial systems for waking and
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sleeping, for expressing how we feel about things and for per-forming complicated acts could do little more than fumble with sensory inputs of the moment. Nor would man have a real feeling of self, for he would have no gallery of the past to examine, learn from, enjoy and, when necessary, hide away in.
Yet after thousands of years of theorizing, of reading and mis-reading his own behavioral quirks, man is just beginning to have some understanding of the mysterious process that per-mits him to break and store bits of passing time.
One problem has been to decide what memory is and what things have it. Linseed oil, for example, has a kind of memory. Once exposed to light, even if only briefly, it will change consistency and speed the second time it is exposed. It will "remember" its first encounter with the light. Electronic and fluidic circuits also have memory, of a more sophisticated kind. Built into computers, they are able to store and retrieve extraordinary amounts of information. And the human body has at least four kinds of memory... .
That's a fine lead. Who doesn't possess some cluster of vivid images that can be recalled from an inconceivably early age?
The reader is eager to learn how such a feat of storage and retrieval is accomplished. The example of the linseed oil is just piquant enough to make us wonder what "memory" really is, and then the writer reverts to the human frame of reference, for it is man who has built the computer circuits and has four kinds of memory himself.
Another personal method is to weave a scientific story around someone else. That was the appeal of the articles called
"Annals of Medicine" that Berton Roueché wrote for many years in The New Yorker. They are detective stories, almost always involving a victim—some ordinary person struck by a mystifying ailment—and a gumshoe obsessed with finding the villain. Here's how one of them begins:
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At about 8 o'clock on Monday morning, Sept. 2 5 , 1944, a ragged, aimless old man of 82 collapsed on the sidewalk on Dey Street, near the Hudson Terminal. Innumerable people must have noticed him, but he lay there alone for several min-utes, dazed, doubled up with abdominal cramps, and in an agony of retching. Then a policeman came along. Until the policeman bent over the old man he may have supposed that he had just a sick drunk on his hands; wanderers dropped by drink are common in that part of town in the early morning.
It was not an opinion that he could have held for long. The old mans nose, lips, ears and fingers were sky-blue.
By noon, eleven blue men have been admitted to nearby hospitals. But never fear: Dr. Ottavio Pellitteri, field epidemiol-ogist, is on the scene and telephoning Dr. Morris Greenberg at the Bureau of Preventable Diseases. Slowly the two men piece together fragments of evidence that seem to defy medical history until the case is nailed down and the villain identified as a type of poisoning so rare that many standard texts on toxicology don't even mention it. Roueché s secret is as old as the art of storytelling.
We are in on a chase and a mystery. But he doesn't start with the medical history of poisoning, or talk about standard texts on toxi-cology. He gives us a man—and not only a man but a blue one.
Another way to help your readers understand unfamiliar facts is to relate them to sights they are familiar with. Reduce the abstract principle to an image they can visualize. Moshe Safdie, the architect who conceived Habitat, the innovative housing complex at Montreal's Expo '67, explains in his book Beyond Habitat that man would build better than he does if he took the time to see how nature does the job, since "nature makes form, and form is a by-product of evolution":
One can study plant and animal life, rock and crystal for-mations, and discover the reasons for their particular form.
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The nautilus has evolved so that when its shell grows, its head will not get stuck in the opening. This is known as gnomonic growth; it results in the spiral formation. It is, mathematically, the only way it can grow.
The same is true of achieving strength with a particular material. Look at the wings of a vulture, at its bone formation.
A most intricate three-dimensional geometric pattern has evolved, a kind of space frame, with very thin bones that get thicker at the ends. The main survival problem for the vulture is to develop strength in the wing (which is under tremendous bending movement when the bird is flying) without building up weight, as that would limit its mobility. Through evolution the vulture has the most efficient structure one can imag-ine—a space frame in bone.
"For each aspect of life there are responses of form," Safdie writes, noting that the maple and the elm have wide leaves to absorb the maximum amount of sun for survival in a temperate climate, whereas the olive tree has a leaf that rotates because it must preserve moisture and can't absorb heat, and the cactus turns itself perpendicular to light. We can all picture a maple leaf and a cactus plant. With every hard principle, Safdie gives us a simple illustration:
Economy and survival are the two key words in nature.
Examined out of context, the neck of the giraffe seems uneco-nomically long, but it is economical in view of the fact that most of the giraffes food is high on the tree. Beauty as we understand it, and as we admire it in nature, is never arbitrary.
Or take this article about bats, by Diane Ackerman. Most of us know only three facts about bats: they're mammals, we don't like them, and they've got some kind of radar that enables them to fly at night without bumping into things. Obviously anyone
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writing about bats must soon get around to explaining how that mechanism of "echo-location" works. In the following passage Ackerman gives us details so precise—and so easy to relate to what we know—that the process becomes a pleasure to read about:
It's not hard to understand echo-location if you picture bats as calling or whistling to their prey with high-frequency sounds. Most of us can't hear these. At our youngest and keenest of ear, we might detect sounds of 20,000 vibrations a second, but bats can vocalize at up to 200,000. They do it not in a steady stream but at intervals—20 or 30 times a second.
A bat listens for the sounds to return to it, and when the echoes start coming faster and louder it knows that the insect it's stalking has flown nearer. By judging the time between echoes, a bat can tell how fast the prey is moving and in which direction. Some bats are sensitive enough to register a beetle walking on sand, and some can detect the movement of a moth flexing its wings as it sits on a leaf.
That's my idea of sensitive; I couldn't ask a writer to give me two more wonderful examples. But there's more to my admira-tion than gratitude. I also wonder: how many other examples of bat sensitivity did she collect—dozens? hundreds?—to be able to choose those two? Always start with too much material. Then give your reader just enough.
As the bat closes in, it may shout faster, to pinpoint its prey. And there's a qualitative difference between a steady, solid echo bouncing off a brick wall and the light, fluid echo from a swaying flower. By shouting at the world and listening to the echoes, bats can compose a picture of their landscape and the objects in it which includes texture, density, motion, distance, size and probably other features, too. Most bats
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really belt it out; we just don't hear them. This is an eerie thought when one stands in a silent grove filled with bats.
They spend their whole lives yelling. They yell at their loved ones, they yell at their enemies, they yell at their dinner, they yell at the big, bustling world. Some yell faster, some slower, some louder, some softer. Long-eared bats don't need to yell;
They spend their whole lives yelling. They yell at their loved ones, they yell at their enemies, they yell at their dinner, they yell at the big, bustling world. Some yell faster, some slower, some louder, some softer. Long-eared bats don't need to yell;