I apologize to my regular readers (this is assuming I have any), but I TA a class on nutrition writing and this post is directed at them.
One of the hardest things for most writers to realize is that there does not have to be a difference between the way you talk and the way you write. Sure, the grammar will be scrutinized more in writing than in casual speech, but the style can remain just the same. A lot of people who are just starting out in consumer writing have trouble with this. If you ask them about a topic, they can talk to you about it for minutes on end in beautiful, casual, conversational tones. If you ask them about the same topic in a writing prompt, they will suddenly do an about-face and write in the most stuffy, dull, and unfathomable prose. There is no need for this.
In order to get this point across I’m going to post some quotes from my favorite science writing. I’m probably going to infringe on some copyrights in doing this, and in response to this I say: please run out and buy these books the moment you are done reading the excerpts. They are fabulous books and will make your life better for the owning.
1. Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything
“And how far is that exactly? It’s almost beyond imagining. Space, you see, is just enormous–just enormous. Let’s imagine, for the purposes of edification and entertainment, that we are about to go on a journey by rocketship. We won’t go terribly far–just to the edge of our own solar system–but we need to get a fix on how big a place space is and what a small part of it we occupy.
“Now the bad news, I’m afraid, is that we won’t be home for supper. Even at the speed of light, it would take seven hours to get to Pluto. But of course we can’t travel at anything like that speed. We’ll have to go at the speed of a spaceship, and these are rather more lumbering. The best speeds yet achieved by any human object are those of the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which are now flying away from us at about thirty-five thousand miles an hour.”
What a nifty piece of writing! (Sorry, I always get a bit British after I finish reading a Bill Bryson book.) He manages to really give the reader an idea of the unimaginable size of space without resorting to listing large numbers over and over again. Instead of saying, “It is seven light hours from the Earth to Pluto,” he illustrates the concept with things that are easier to imagine, like missing a whole day (and a meal) during the journey. It might take him a few more words to make the point, but in the end the point is more likely to be remembered. Plus, this writing style keeps the readers’ attention much better than something pompous or stuffy. It’s more like having a conversation over the kitchen table.
2. Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle
“Leafy greens are nature’s spring tonic, coming on strong in local markets in April and May, and then waning quickly when weather gets hot. Chard will actually put up a fight against summer temperatures, but lettuce gives up as early as late May in the south. As all good things must come to an end, the leafy-greens season closes when the plant gets a cue from the thermometer–85 degrees seems to do it for most varieties. Then they go through what amounts to plant puberty: shooting up, transforming practically overnight from short and squat to tall and graceful, and of course it is all about sex. The botanical term is bolting. It ends with a cluster of blossoms forming atop the tall stems; for lettuces, these flowers are tiny yellow versions of their cousin, the dandelion. And like any adolescent, the bolting lettuce plant has volatile chemicals coursing through its body; in the case of lettuce, the plant is manufacturing a burst of sesquiterpene lactones, the compounds that make a broken lettuce stem ooze milky white sap, and which render it suddenly so potently, spit-it-out bitter. When lettuce season is over, it’s over.”
You may be noticing an emerging theme with my choices of writing samples: imagery and comparisons are a great way to get across difficult-to-understand concepts without sounding dull and losing your audience. In this case Kingsolver compares a bolting head of lettuce to a child hitting his or her teenage years. She does this so artfully that you might never notice the science that she’s managing to teach while making this comparison. I now know that “sesquiterpene lactones”are the chemical compounds responsible for the bitter taste in bolted lettuce, and yet I never felt like I was being lectured to while reading that paragraph.
3. Brad Kessler’s Goat Song
“Like all ruminants, goats have four stomachs, the largest of which, the rumen, is a kind of fermentation vat containing thousands of microbes (bacteria and protozoa) that turn otherwise indigestible cellulose into food. When a goat goes off to browse, she fills her rumen to capacity with leaves and grass. Once sated, she retreats to a safe place–a barn or cliff or a place with a view–and in a quiet moment, usually in the company of others, she ruminates. She stretches her neck and regurgitates from her rumen a ball of party digested cud. She chews this over and over, and the roughage further breaks down as it passes back and forth from the rumen to the reticulum. When she’s thoroughly masticated the material, she’ll extend her neck again–this closes a slit in the esophagus and prevents food from directly entering the rumen–and the cud drops into the third stomach, the omasum. Final digestion occurs in the abomasum, the “true” stomach, which corresponds to the single stomach of other mammals–a stomach like our own.”
This piece is by far the most scientific of all the pieces I have posted, and yet it still manages to stay on the right side of the lecture/conversation continuum. Kessler manages this in a variety of ways. He works to avoid using the same word over and over again. He’ll say”chew” the first time, but “masticate” the second; “stretch” in the beginning, but “extend” later on. This keeps the writing from sounding dull without adding to the word count. Kessler also includes little details to help the reader relate to his topic. For example, the simple addition of the phrase, “a stomach like our own,” at the end of the paragraph takes the information about this stomach’s mammalian similarities and brings it home.
4. David C. Funder’s The Personality Puzzle
“The method is called convergent validation. It can be illustrated by the duck test: If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is very probably (but still not absolutely positively) a duck. (Maybe it’s a Disney audio-animatronic machine built to resemble a duck. But probably not.) Convergent validation is arrived at by assembling diverse pieces of information–such as appearance, walking and swimming style, and quakiness–that “converge” on a common conclusion, in this case that it must be a duck. The more items of diverse information that converge, the more confident one is in the conclusion.”
I don’t care how little psychology you’ve studied or how disinterested you are in the topic: this is amusing. This is from a textbook that I was assigned in undergrad, and this textbook is the only one I have kept and lugged from house to house since my graduation. The reason for this is the ability of the author to define standard psychology terms in ways that make them easy to comprehend. The use of a concrete and example can make something much more clear than paragraphs of theory. And the use of humor can keep a reader’s attention so they don’t give up on your subject. Managing to combine these two strategies without sacrificing the accuracy of your science writing can be difficult, but is worth every ounce of effort you put into it if you succeed.
I hope you’ve enjoyed these pieces and I hope they are helpful as models for how you can communicate science or nutrition information while still being true to your own tone and style. Just be yourself and think about how you would want someone else to explain a concept to you and then write it down that way. There’s no need to make writing something so different from how you normally express yourself to another person.