How to Write a Popular Scientific Article
Most scientific workers desire to spread knowledge of their subject and to increase their income. Both can be done by writing on science for the general public. In what follows I shall give some hints on how to do it.
The first thing to remember is that your task is not easy and will be impossible if you despise technique. For literature has its technique, like science, and unless you set yourself a very high standard you will get nowhere. So don’t expect to succeed at your first, or even second attempt.
For whom are you writing? This is even more important than the choice of the subject. Moreover the length of the article will depend on where it is to be published.
Now for the subject matter. You may take a particular piece of research work, or a particular application of science. Or you may choose some general principle, and illustrate it from different branches of scientific work. For example an interesting article could be written on fruitful accidents. Priestley broke a thermometer, and the fate of the mercury from it led him to the discovery of oxygen.
Probably you will do better to begin on some more specialized topic, unless you are a student of the history of science.
Whatever the subject matter, it is important to remember that you want to interest or even excite your readers, but not to give them complete information. A number of the articles which are submitted to me from time to time are far too like examination answers. They give the impression that the author has looked the subject up, and tried to give a condensed summary of it. Such a summary may be all very well in a text-book, but will not hold the attention of a reader of popular articles, who does not contemplate severe intellectual exertion.
This does not mean that you must write for an audience of fools. It means that you must constantly be returning from the unfamiliar facts of science to the familiar facts of everyday experience. It is good to start from a well-known fact, say, cheese.
This will enable you to illustrate some scientific principle. But here again take a familiar analogy. If you know enough, you will be able to proceed to your goal in a series of hops rather than a single long jump.
If you try to write an article in this way, you will probably discover your own ignorance, especially of quantitative matters. It may take you twelve hours’ reading to produce in intellectually honest article of a thousand words. In fact, you will have to educate yourself as well as your public.
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When you have done your article, give it to a friend, if possible to a fairly ignorant one. Or put it away for six months and see if you still understand it yourself. You will probably find that some of the sentences which seemed simple when you wrote them, now appear very involved. Here are some hints on combing them out.
Can you get in a full-stop(точка) instead of a comma(запятая) or a semi-colon (точка с запятой)? If so, get it in. It gives your reader a chance to draw his breath. Can you use an active verb instead of a passive verb or a verbal noun? If so, use it. Instead of “Open windows are often thought to be good for health”, or “There is a widespread opinion that open windows are good for health”, try “Many people think that open windows are good for health.”
Try to make the order of the phrases in your sentences correspond with the temporal or causal order of the facts with which you deal. Instead of “Species change because of the survival of the fittest” try “The fittest members survive in each generation, and so a species changes.”
Of course in the history of scientific discovery an effect is commonly known before its cause. And fairly often a mathematical theorem is known to be probably true before it is formally proved. If you enunciate your theorem before you prove it, you are apt to give the impression, as Euclid does, that you are producing rabbits from a hat.
Whereas if you lead up to it gently, you create less impression of cleverness, but your reader may find your argument much easier to follow. It’s necessary for you to go slow and show him as many steps as you can in your arguments or causal chain even if, in your own thinking, you skip some of them or take them backwards.
When you have written the article it may seem rather gaunt or forbidding, a catalogue of hard facts and abstract arguments. A critic may say it needs padding. I object to padding for padding’s sake. It is characteristic of writers who are more interested in their own style than their subject matter, but out of place in a scientific article.
On the other hand you must do what you can to help your reader to link up your article with the rest of his knowledge. You can do this by referring to familiar facts or to familiar literature. I think it is worthwhile to show the continuity of human thought. I consider it desirable to point out that many people before me had a theory on the subject. I think that popular science can be of real value by emphasizing the unity of human knowledge and endeavour, at their best. This fact is hardly stressed at all in the ordinary teaching of science, and good popular science should correct this fault, both by showing how science is created by technology and creates it, and by showing the relation between scientific and other forms of thought.
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A popular scientific article should, where possible, include some news. I try, as a rule, to include one or two facts which will not be familiar to a student taking a university honours course in the subject in question, unless his teachers keep well up with the periodical literature. Of course some care is needed in appraising new work.
A very large number of alleged discoveries are not confirmed by subsequent workers.
Ifthe writer is actually engaged in research, and has seen a number of his own bright ideas go west, he is less likely to fall into this particular trap.
In the early stages of popular writing it is well to write out a summary of the article.
Here is a possible skeleton for an article:
Introduction. A well-known fact.
Central theme. The process of manufacture.
Why it is important.
Connections with other branches of science.
Practical suggestions.
That is one way of doing it.
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