Sharing
the numinous adventure of discovery is one of the great
pleasures of a life in science. As speakers or listeners, writers or
readers, teachers or students, we nourish our intellectual lives by
exchanging ideas, techniques, hopes, and frustrations. All of these
roles are active; for that reason, every memorable talk or research
paper is a performance and conversation.
Perhaps some people are born speakers or writers, but in my experience,
anyone who claims to be a natural has a faulty memory. Talent may beget
craft, but craft is won over time through observation and emulation,
through practice and coaching. We become better speakers by becoming
more attentive listeners, better writers by becoming more discerning
readers, better teachers by becoming more responsive students—and in
every case vice versa!
Michael Alley's The Craft of Scientific Presentations: Critical Steps to
Succeed and Critical Errors to Avoid and Scott Montgomery's The Chicago
Guide to Communicating Science begin with the premise that good
scientific writing or speaking about science is, fundamentally, good
writing or speaking. Effective communication is not achieved by filling
out a template but by thinking carefully about the topic and the
audience, by learning from others, and by never being satisfied. The
strength of these books is that they do not merely compile dos and
don'ts; they present the reader with issues that require consideration
and explore those issues through engaging anecdotes and examples.
Alley's and Montgomery's books both have elements of conversation that
engage a reader in ways a list of rules would not. They can be
profitably read from cover to cover, but they can also be opened to a
specific section for reference.
Scientific writing in research journals and writing about science in
popularizations call for principles of organization and storytelling
that are familiar in fiction and personal essays. Techniques include
building a narrative arc, creating and resolving tension, and using the
minute particular to attract the reader's attention and frame the
discussion. My conception of writing and editing has been enriched by
the advice, some of it confessional, of writers I respect. David Lodge's
The Practice of Writing (Penguin, 1997), Richard Rhodes's How to Write:
Advice and Reflections (Quill/HarperCollins, 1995), and Robert Graves
and Alan Hodge's The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers
of English Prose (Random House, 1979) have reinforced or challenged my
instincts.
Scientific presentations, whether for a gathering of colleagues or a
general audience, benefit from techniques of stagecraft and rhetoric. A
memorable presentation will rarely be an unpunctuated sequence of
equations or an uninflected recitation of sources of systematic error.
Surprise and drama are precious elements of a talk, and the power of
specimens, artifacts, and even souvenirs to engage an audience is too
little exploited in physics lectures. Just as a writer makes an implicit
compact with the reader, a speaker shapes, and then must meet, an
audience's expectations.
Time is the easiest factor to measure, so it is essential to plan an end
for your talk. Indeed, it makes good sense to begin planning your talk
from the end by asking, "Why am I doing this? What is my punch line?"
Because images are so central to many scientific presentations, I find
myself returning again and again to Edward Tufte's three classics, The
Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Graphics Press, 1983),
Envisioning Information (Graphics Press, 1990) and Visual Explanations:
Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (Graphics Press, 1997).
Alley's The Craft of Scientific Presentations joins his earlier books on
writing, The Craft of Scientific Writing (Prentice Hall, 1987) and The
Craft of Editing: A Guide for Managers, Scientists, and Engineers
(Springer–Verlag, 2000). Alley is in the mechanical engineering
department at Virginia Tech, where his approach to writing and speaking
is incorporated into several lab and design courses. He maintains a Web
site on writing guidelines for engineering
and science students. The Craft of Scientific Presentations is informal
in tone but serious in intent. Alley makes the reader think about the
point of a presentation, about different kinds of presentations, and
about different techniques—from writing on a blackboard to using
computer slide shows. He shows how to think about finding the right
words, structure, and images. He is at his best discussing well-chosen
examples from both great and lesser-known lecturers, and his counsel to
anticipate what could go wrong is sage advice.
Montgomery's Chicago Guide to Communicating Science has all the
authority one would expect from the publishers of The Chicago Manual of
Style (U. of Chicago Press, 2003). Montgomery is a consulting geologist,
writer, and independent scholar who covers with scholarly grace topics
ranging from writing scientific papers and grant proposals to preparing
articles for the general public and for Internet publishing. He, too,
emphasizes the importance of developing an effective style by studying
and imitating successful models and using them to find one's own voice.
He shows the value of thoughtful revision and refinement by presenting
before-and-after examples (and sometimes after-and-after examples,
because once is not enough) of passages from scientific papers.
Montgomery points out that reading widely to become a better writer
means reading your own work, too. Many graceful writers have come to
value the ear of the native speaker as an editorial instrument. It is
important to read your writing aloud, even an article for the Physical
Review, to measure the cadence and test whether you can follow your own
thoughts. Montgomery also offers good advice about graphics by advancing
the laudable notion that revision should apply to images as well as
words.
The best advice I can add for a young scientist-writer is to hope that
you will meet a gifted editor who believes that your literary soul is
worth saving. Until that happy day, spending time with these books will
give you food for thought and the encouragement to practice, practice,
practice!
Chris Quigg is a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, and was for 10 years the editor of the
Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science.