With a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering and more than 12 years of experience as a science communicator, I'm an expert at helping scientists tell their science stories. If you're looking to become a more confident communicator of science, check out my newsletter!
Issue 08 - Showing the Writing Process
Hi there, Reader! I have a confession: I've gotten behind on writing blog posts. When I started, I had several extra draft posts ready to go, but then life happened and those evaporated. That's left me scrambling week-by-week for what I'll write about. But that pressure has been good in some ways. It's forced me to think about some of my core messages and how I can demonstrate them in useful ways.
That brings me to today's topics. In both of these articles, I aim to show parts of the writing process that are typically hidden. In one, I take apart someone else's article to see how she constructed the narrative. And in the other, I turn my sights on my own work and reveal some of what goes on as I write my book. I hope they're both helpful in their own ways.
If you see a detail you'd like me to elaborate on, hit reply and let me know!
Deconstructing Good Scicomm
In my workshops, I suggest deconstructing a good piece of scicomm when you find one. Here I share how I deconstructed a Wired article I liked.
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How I Write, January 2023 Edition
Writing isn't a straightforward process, but that process is mostly hidden. Today I show some of my own (highly iterative) process as I work on writing a book.
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From Around the Web
- The Teeny Tiny Scientific Screwup That Helped COVID Kill - This is the article that I deconstruct in this week's blog post. If you're having trouble seeing it on Wired, you can read it with my annotations here.
- Feeling worried about ChatGPT and teaching writing? I tend to agree with John Warner that this is an opportunity to actually teach better writing.
From the Archives
Both of this week's blog posts build on ideas from my open-access article on how scientists can adopt a communication lifestyle, where scicomm is integrated into regular activities.
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That's it for now! I'll see you again in two weeks with more scicomm tips, tricks, and inspiration. - Nicole
Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
With a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering and more than 12 years of experience as a science communicator, I'm an expert at helping scientists tell their science stories. If you're looking to become a more confident communicator of science, check out my newsletter!
Hi, Reader! This year my summer calendar has a massive question mark hanging over it. That's not, in my experience, conducive to steady, quality writing each week. So I've decided to put the blog and this newsletter on a hiatus until life gets a little more certain. I expect to return in a couple months with lots more to say and share about communicating science. In the meantime, though, I leave you with another edition of "Fixed It For You" - this time powered by ChatGPT. Or rather, inspired...
Hi, Reader! Whether you like them or loathe them, we all have to deal with time and word limits at some point. In this issue, I take a look at the questions you should ask yourself anytime you're operating with one of these constraints. And because we all sometimes have budget constraints, too, I share some of my secrets for finding free, royalty-free images, video footage, music, and sound effects. I hope they'll help you dress up your presentations, videos, and research posters without...
Hi, Reader! Since I was asked a few weeks ago to prepare a five-minute, no-slides talk for Fellows of the Royal Society, I've had constraints on the brain. I feel like we scientists and engineers love to complain about time limits and word counts and just not having enough space for our voices and ideas. But the more I thought about constraints in other contexts, like art, the more I realized that constraints are, in fact, a good thing to have. And not just for the audience or conference...