Writing about STEM is vital to help spread new ideas and scientific discoveries among students, experts, and the general public. The problem, says Brandon R. Brown, is that many STEM experts have never studied the craft of writing and communicating their work to the world.
“Most of us in science and engineering backgrounds receive very few communications-related courses,” says Brown, an author and professor of Physics and Astronomy, Arts and Sciences at the University of San Francisco.
After graduating, many scientists are surprised at how much writing they have to do. “One of the sad consequences is that we have a model for a lot of scientific writing that comes from laboratory reports,” says Brown. “You start with an introduction, dry and historical, and then you move to the methods and then to the data. And then you enter into the so-called discussions and conclusions.”
Students pick up on these conventions and are often trained, directly or indirectly, to write about science in this desert-barren way. Brown seeks to revitalize scientific prose by providing teachers, scientists, researchers, students, and others with an alternative model for STEM writing in Sharing our science: how to write and speak STEMwhich was published in August by MIT Press.
While his advice is aimed at professional scientists, educators can use his suggestions to convey STEM topics to students and begin to encourage them to write about STEM in a more interesting way.
1) STEM Writing: Think like a fiction writer
“I’m not preaching, with people hanging from cliffs or with loaded guns on the mantelpiece,” Brown says. But when writing about science, more scientists and educators could use the narrative techniques of fiction writers to improve their work.
“It’s nothing revolutionary, but just taking concepts from fiction like, ‘Why would anyone want to read past the first paragraph?’ – Keeping that reader in mind as a human being,” he says. “I think a lot of communication about science and engineering involves a lot of interest on the part of the public. And some experts in the field will have to be interested. But there is a way to bring our critical questions to light or (explain) why the work is important that can help motivate the reader and make it a more engaging read.”
2) Use subtitles
Sometimes making STEM writing more engaging is an easy matter of adding a few subheadings between different sections to help tell the story of the research being discussed.
“In today’s world, people scan documents very quickly between meetings,” Brown says. “If you only see ‘introduction,’ ‘methods,’ and ‘discussion,’ that doesn’t tell you anything. The world, even in research journals, welcomes more descriptive subtitles that help tell a story at first glance.”
3) Use better phrases
In the book, Brown spends time emphasizing the importance of good sentence structure in writing rather than the wordy, passive, prepositional phrases that make up much of STEM writing today.
“I joke with the scientists about how they would invite each other to lunch.” Brown says. “If you did it as if you were writing a research paper, it would take 10 minutes, it would be in the passive voice, and it would be very confusing.”
To avoid this kind of confusing language, Brown recommends following the advice of Francine Prose, an acclaimed novelist and writing guru, who urges writers to read what they write out loud and ask themselves if they would ever say something that way. If the answer is “No,” then it’s time to get back to writing.
4) Highlight narrative tension
“A great professor I had said, ‘Every plot boils down to something or someone having a goal and running into obstacles,’” Brown says. “I think science and engineering readers love the story of ‘What obstacles did you come up with and how did you get around them?’”
Brown urges those who write about STEM to start with those obstacles. “’This is what we want to do and this is why it’s hard.’ Establishing that so-called narrative tension from above can be fantastic,” he says. “Many scientific writings and technical communications contain that story, but a little submerged, such as at the end of the first two pages or at the beginning of the second section of the article. And I don’t think it hurts anyone’s format to bring that to light.”
