Posts Tagged ‘audience’
Bringing opinion essays into being / The Chronic Migraine Chronicles
To welcome spring we kicked off an opinion-essay writing drive, then workshopped sections from a forthcoming memoir-and-science-guide for general readers about living with chronic migraines. Benefits of opinion-essay writing Opinion essays about science for the general public can appear in newspapers or blogs and have many advantages. Writing them forces us to clarify the social…
Read MoreWould you want to live longer but get younger?
We had a fun challenge this month from Hanna Västinsalo, our celebrity filmmaker, who leverages her PhD in genetics to entertain audiences with unexpected science stories with a human perspective. We workshopped Hanna’s marketing strategy for her powerful new science-fiction film depicting the psychological experience of reverse aging, Palimpsest. To help with that task, we…
Read MoreReaching resistant readers
How do you get your message to the audience that needs to hear it—especially if they are likely to resist? For that matter, as writers, how do we learn enough about our intended audience that we can meet them where they are? The author of one of the draft texts we workshopped this month faced…
Read MoreWriting for kids makes us better science writers for adults
One of the senior scientists in our workshop group recently found himself in the impromptu situation of sitting down for a video interview about his complex research on mitochondrial diseases—but the interviewer was a child. The episode reminded us of the famous WIRED magazine video series “5 Levels”, in which “an expert scientist explains a…
Read MoreShould scientists express opinions? If so, how?
Among the top 100 most-influential scientists on Twitter—according to an early and somewhat controversial survey by Science way back in 2014—was Trish Greenhalgh (pictured). Today Greenhalgh is at Oxford, where she directs interdisciplinary research at the crossroads of social sciences and medicine. Since those early days of social media, when “sci-comm”—science communication—was exploding across Twitter…
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