Science blogging: The essential guide - Christie Wilcox, Bethany Brookshire, Jason G. Goldman 2016
Communicating science as a graduate student
Jason G. Goldman
Many of the scientists blogging about science on the Internet are still in graduate school. By blogging while in graduate school, students may feel encouraged to explore new aspects of their research and may further develop their writing skills. Jason G. Goldman, who started his blog The Thoughtful Animal while in graduate school, explores the pros and cons of writing as a graduate student, and suggests how you can use your blog to help your career as a young scientist.
Life as a graduate student can be hard, but you probably don’t need me to tell you that. That’s true whether you’re a graduate student in the sciences or in the humanities, or in a professional school like business or journalism. You’ve got to balance some combination of research, classwork, and teaching commitments. You have to get yourself to conferences in order to network and to present your posters and papers to your colleagues. If you’re in a professional school, you probably have an internship or two to complete. You need to write and write and then write some more. You should eat well and exercise. Ideally, you must also try to maintain a social life: go to the movies, see your friends. Read a book or two. Fiction, even. Some days, it feels like you’ve just enrolled in clown school, and on the first day the instructors have you trying to juggle three balls, a ferret, two knives, and a bowling pin. Then—don’t duck!—here comes a chainsaw. (And, by the way, it’s on fire. Don’t kill the ferret.)
So why would you want to even entertain the notion of doing more work right now? Why on earth would you start your own blog while in grad school? Indeed, graduate students in the STEM fields (and all scientists, more generally) overwhelmingly blame time constraints for their inability to devote themselves to science communication.1 The assumption—whether that’s your assumption as a graduate student, your adviser’s assumption, or your assumption regarding your adviser’s assumptions—is that spending the time doing outreach will interfere with the goal of learning how to conduct research.
But that assumption, as you will see, is flawed. It turns out that if you plan your science communication efforts thoughtfully, then you can capitalize on them to build your own scientific skills and to advance your own scientific career. And that’s not to mention the benefit of contributing to scientific literacy more generally among your friends, family, and the general public.
If you’re not in a scientific program and are instead a graduate student in science journalism, you may think that you’re already doing enough writing as it is. But although blogging may not sharpen your writing skills the way it might for a scientist, the benefits of blogging reach far beyond writing practice. Just because you’re already writing a lot as a part of your course requirements and your internships doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from blogging as well. So while most of the remainder of this chapter approaches the question of blogging from the perspective of a student in a scientific program, keep in mind that many of these arguments also apply to you.
Blogging as professional development
One of my motivations for starting a blog in my second year as a graduate student in a psychology department was to practice writing about science. If I wrote a post or two a week, I thought, then when it came time to write my dissertation, the writing process itself would be far less daunting. Indeed, by the time I was approaching the end of my time in graduate school, I had been a science blogger for four years. I had written, give or take, some 1,500 to 3,000 words about science nearly every week. With all that practice, hammering out a dissertation’s worth of words was a relative breeze. I was used to sitting down in front of a blank screen, typing and typing and typing until there were no more words left to type, then waking up the next day and doing the same thing. I wrote a first draft of my dissertation over the course of about three weeks, and spent another week or two editing it and making it pretty. When I started graduate school, putting together a doctoral thesis seemed like climbing Mount Everest: I’d need a team of sherpas, and there was a very real chance I might wind up dead. By the end, it was just another writing project, more like climbing the stair machine at the gym: a workout, to be sure, but something I could confidently complete without fearing for my very survival.
Here are three ways in which practicing science communication as a graduate student will help build the skills necessary for success in science or science communication.
Writing
As my own experience illustrates, the best way to practice writing is to write, and with frequency. But blogging also widens your audience, which will enrich your writing even more. “As a matter of course,” wrote Lauren M. Kuehne and her colleagues in a 2014 paper, “students may be expected to write articles for publication in scientific journals and give presentations at conferences, but the reach of those forms of communication is generally limited to other scientists in the field. By contrast, less traditional tools such as maintaining a personal website or contributing to a blog can improve writing skills while allowing non-scientists to access student research directly.”
With a blog, you can learn how to build a compelling argument and, thanks to the comments section, receive nearly instant feedback. It doesn’t matter if your commenters don’t agree with you, as long as they understand your arguments in the first place. Blogging will teach you how to craft better analogies and stronger metaphors, simply because much of the best science writing is built around those techniques. Most people can’t intuitively visualize particles in an atom, organelles in a cell, or neurons in a brain. As you write more you will learn how to describe the mysteries of the universe in concrete, easy-to-grasp ways. And by doing so, you will learn the importance of brevity. You will learn not to write in three paragraphs what could take only one sentence to clarify. When you’re writing for your colleagues, you might take time to explain the complex chemosensory properties of the suckers that line octopus arms. But for a general audience, you might simply ask them to “imagine what it would be like if the majority of your body were made of tongues, able to both touch and taste the entire world,” as I once did.2
Becoming a skilled science writer is more than writing good articles and blog posts. It’s learning how to write clever, snappy headlines that will make readers more likely to click a link or to linger over a page. It’s also figuring out how to best pair your words with photos and graphics.
As a scientist, the ability to communicate complex, nuanced ideas in more accessible ways is important beyond your ability to do outreach. That’s because scientists in other fields aren’t familiar with the jargon of your field, let alone the fundamental theories and assumptions that underlie your research—yet in many cases they will be responsible for evaluating your grant proposals, interviewing you for faculty jobs, and voting on your tenure application. Even if you don’t care one bit about increasing scientific literacy among non-scientists, you should care about developing your ability to explain science to folks outside of your own field. Besides, if you can’t explain your science in a way that a motivated high school student can understand, you might not really understand it that well yourself.
Teaching
All those skills you develop by writing and writing and writing some more? Guess what—you need many of them for teaching too, which is also an important ability to strengthen, especially if you plan on remaining in the academic world.
Being a great science teacher is not so different from being a great science writer. You have to convince your audience to pay attention to you, rather than to the myriad other potential sources of entertainment and engagement out there. You then have to maintain their attention: at any time, a reader can click over to a different website or turn the page of the magazine. In a classroom, your students are just three seconds away from surfing over to Facebook on their laptops.
As a teacher or a writer, you also have to break down complex ideas into understandable chunks. Most importantly, the contract between teacher and student is a lot like the unspoken one between writer and reader. The better you learn how to write compelling prose, the better you will be at entertaining your students who, in many cases, might not actually want to be in class in the first place. The writer implicitly says to the reader: I will value you and your time, because I know that you are just two boring sentences away from reaching for your cell phone and playing Candy Crush, and in return you will spend some unspecified amount of time reading my sentences, equal to only a small fraction of the time that I spent crafting those sentences in the first place, and I will be thrilled to receive your attention, no matter how brief.
Speaking
Public speaking is a common fear. Improving your writing skills will no doubt help you give better, smoother, more professional talks. In addition to the teaching-related skills mentioned earlier, blogging will help you learn when to lean less on words and more on imagery. That’s perhaps the most important thing to learn as you build your slide decks. Next time you attend a talk—perhaps a department lecture, or a job talk, or even a public talk—pay attention to the mechanics of the talk. Are the slides too text heavy? Is the content of the talk appropriate for the audience? Is the speaker allowing the audience time to examine the slides? Is the speech itself consistent with the content on the slides, or is the speaker saying one thing while the audience is distracted by looking at something else? Is there too much jargon? You will quickly see that many of the basic rules for creating effective blogs translate to public speaking.
As a scientist, you will be expected to give many talks: to your colleagues, to potential employers, and to the public. If you receive funding from a nonprofit group, giving talks may be part of the deal. One nonprofit in Los Angeles, for example, funds academic research on urban wildlife. As part of their agreement, scientists who receive funding are expected to give talks to update the members of the organization on their findings. And of course the ability to give talks without becoming anxious can be very useful when looking for a job. If your career path is professional science writing, public speaking may be less of an expectation, but writers are increasingly using speaking engagements to supplement their income. If you end up going on book tours and giving interviews on TV and on the radio, too, strong public-speaking skills will certainly be needed.
The rest
There are plenty of other, smaller benefits that come from blogging about science while you’re still in graduate school. When I talk to graduate students who are interested in blogging about science, the overwhelming stumbling block is that they feel like they don’t have enough time. The truth is that all that time you spend during your workday checking Facebook and daydreaming about what sort of microwaved food product you’ll eat that night (buy some vegetables and make a salad, you poor graduate student!) can be better utilized. Learning time management will set you up for success in your professional life, no matter what route you take.
Learning to blog will, almost by accident, mean that you will learn the basics of setting up a website. These days, all you need to set up a little corner of your own on the Internet are some very basic HTML skills and an understanding of how to operate a content management system like WordPress. Whatever career you wind up in, whether in science, journalism, or something else entirely, being able to manage your own Internet presence is an increasingly vital skill, and one that will make you even more attractive to potential employers.
Finally, if you’re a scientist, you are no doubt aware that post-publication peer review is increasingly important. Conventional peer review is still an important mechanism for ensuring that the science that gets published in academic journals is coherent and accurate, but it is not perfect. No longer will journalists from traditional media outlets be the only ones writing about your work. Instead, bloggers—some of them scientists themselves—will be writing about your research on their own blogs. Even if you don’t intend to become a prolific blogger yourself, understanding more about the culture of science blogging will allow you to respond appropriately when your work is either praised or criticized. Having your own blog will also, of course, give you a platform for communicating your own science yourself. That’s especially important if you feel that the mainstream media have overstepped in their interpretation of your findings, or if you feel that your colleagues have unfairly criticized your work. Like any other community, online science communication has its own culture, its own set of spoken and unspoken rules. The more familiar you are with them, the better you can engage productively with your colleagues.
Finally and most importantly, you should blog because it’s fun. What other excuse do you have to read obscure papers in your field that aren’t really relevant to your own research and then tell the world about them? In what other venue can you lean on animated cat GIFs to explain some complicated concept in your field? Let’s face it: if you’re reading this book, you’re probably thinking about blogging already. And if you’re in grad school, you need all the entertainment you can get.
Jason G. Goldman is a freelance science writer. He has written for Scientific American, Los Angeles Magazine, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Slate, Salon, io9, BBC Earth, and elsewhere. He contributes multiple pieces each week to Conservation Magazine, is a columnist for BBC Future, and is a staff writer for the Earth Touch News Network. He also hosts a weekly podcast called The Wild Life, sponsored by Earth Touch.
Jason is based in Los Angeles. Find him at his website, http://www.jasonggoldman.com, or follow him on Twitter, @jgold85.
Notes
1. Lauren M. Kuehne et al., “Practical Science Communication Strategies for Graduate Students,” Conservation Biology 28, no. 5 (2014): 1225—1235.
2. Jason G. Goldman, “The Alien Brains Living on Earth,” Uniquely Human, BBC Future, June 26, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140626-the-alien-brains-living-on-earth.