15 Nov 1995, The Daily Telegraph

As well as science what do you know?

Expert advice on how to win the ninth Young Science Writer Awards from astronomer John Barrow.

By John Barrow

SO YOU want to be a science writer. "Listen," one told me, "I've been writing for just a few months and I've already sold several articles - my coat, my typewriter, and my watch." So how do you join this lucrative profession?

Anyone can have a go, but asking how to make a success of it is a little like asking the gardener of Trinity College how he gets his lawns to look so immaculate. "Just roll and water for 600 years sir."

The moral is that it is a gradual process. There needs to be groundwork: the establishment of a base of accurate information, a grip on the grammar of language, and an ability to apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair. But don't lock yourself away in a lighthouse, because you also need an eye for the world around you: an ability to see everyday things in new ways and a familiarity with matters of interest to the public and the press.

Keep your eye on a wide range of newspapers and magazines. You will find it difficult to write effectively for publications of which you are not a reader. Your own grasp of science will determine the limit of your ability to shed light on developments at its frontiers. Let common sense be your guide.

Don't attempt a confident pronouncement on the significance of relativistic quantum field theory if you know less about it than the average reader, or their cat. But don't give up. Why not try to interview some experts? Be what you are, a typical reader wanting to find out something about a subject of which you know almost nothing.

Ask the questions needed to discover what it's all about. Find out about the individuals who do the research: Why do they do it? How do they work? What else do they do? They might just be looking for someone like you to write a popular article.

Get used to obtaining information from the primary source - the scientists doing the work - not from other popular accounts of it. In the process you will accumulate a collection of useful contacts. Fortunately, there is more to science writing than writing about science.

Your success or failure will hinge largely upon your knowledge of other things. Most scientists make poor literary expositors because they know little beyond their own field and write only for like-minded experts in research journals that make few linguistic demands upon them. Scientists are extreme specialists. By contrast, the successful science writer is more often a divergent thinker.

Two of my favourites, Primo Levi (The Periodic Table) and Diane Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses), could not be called science writers at all, but use science to illuminate the many aspects of the human condition.

Another favourite, Alan Lightman (Einstein's Dreams), informs fiction with science in a unique way. There is something unexpected and oblique about the writing of each of these authors that shows up the average scientist's limited experience of the world and its inhabitants. Be encouraged: because of this blindspot you may one day be surprised to discover that you have made a better job of writing about Professor Jargonbender's Nobel-prizewinning discovery (and Professor Jargonbender) than ever he could himself.

Good writing encourages good reading: good writing is writing that is read, and then re-read. What you read and re-read will colour your style.

Its quality will set the standard you aspire to reach. It should also teach you of the need to adopt different styles for different audiences. Charles Darwin's prose style sounds very impressive in Victorian drawing-rooms but would not impress the editor of a mass circulation newspaper today. Know your audience.

As in most things, practice makes perfect. Look for opportunities to write for others. Letter writing is a much neglected art and book reviewing provides an ephemeral outlet that offers a ready-made answer to that great question of human existence, "What shall I write about?".

The word processor will probably be the tool of your trade. It is a blessing and a curse. Its positive features are obvious, but it will make your prose baggy and indirect; it tempts you to reuse sentences and paragraphs, to move them around, in fact to do anything except delete them.

Revision should be a process of simplification: removing redundant words, dividing long sentences, choosing the best words and placing them in the best possible order. A little humour helps make science more digestible. Can you make good use of it? Some parts of your article are of special importance. The title is vital. Does your opening sentence capture the reader's attention? In your final sentence you have the reader's total attention. Make the most of it. Does what you write pass the test of the tongue - can it be read aloud? Try it. Does it sound right, does it flow, does it have continuity, does it makes sense?

Generally, good speakers make good writers. It is no accident that the greatest writings in the English language, the King James Bible and Shakespeare's plays, were written to be read aloud. If you can't explain science in simple words to your friends at the pub you probably won't be able to do it on paper either.

Verbal explanation also brings you into direct contact with listeners and typical readers. You learn immediately what they find hard to understand, where your attempts flounder, and what questions they want answering. Remember the three golden rules: think no jargon, speak no jargon, write no jargon.

Okay, so you've got style, you know a little science, and you know how to check your facts; but how do you find something to write about? Your greatest gift is curiosity. Encourage it; it will help you to identify those everyday phenomena that others overlook. Interesting science is all around you.

Develop an eye for the unexpected connections between things, or for those unusually simple questions that children ask. Why is the sky dark at night? Why is the sky blue? Why are there only two sexes? How big could a tree grow? How does a photocopier work? Why don't we fall through the floor?

Choose your subject carefully. Be original. The popularisation of evolutionary biology, quantum physics, cosmology, and consciousness is pretty well worked over. Why not be different?

The modern world surrounds us with machines about whose workings most people have little or no knowledge. Why not enlighten them? Most of the population take an interest in sport without noticing its science: the flight of the frisbee, the spin and swing of a cricket ball, the swerve of footballs and golfballs.

The Olympic Games are coming up; have you ever wondered why high-jumpers use the Fosbury Flop, which weight-lifter is pound-for-pound (sorry kilogram-for-kilogram) the strongest, or how ice-skaters manage to spin so fast?

Closer to home, how many people know how their television works or why a hot iron removes the creases from their clothes? On to the kitchen, where you could develop a taste for the chemistry of cooking. Next stop, try the bathroom, where the chemical mysteries of perfumes, lathers and soaps, together with the acoustics of singing in the shower and the meteorology of condensation, should keep you busy for a while.

Still stuck? Out to the garden for the subtleties of the greenhouse and the symmetries of snowflakes and icicles.

After all this you're going to need a stiff drink. But have you ever wondered why wine is so . . . Sorry, now it's your turn.

Professor John D. Barrow is professor of Astronomy at the University of Sussex. His latest book, The Artful Universe, a scientist's look at human culture and creativity, is published on November 23 by Oxford University Press.