I had a splendid time recently working with members of the
National
Association of Science Writers. About 150 of them locked
me in a Baltimore conference room and squeezed every bit of writing
knowledge from my brain. They weren't satisfied with just 50
writing tools. They wanted 100.
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Poynter Online - Roy's Writing Tools - Tool #16
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For our writing tools workshop, I chose an essay by a hot science
writer named
Olivia Judson, who writes
funny books about sex and
evolutionary biology. I first encountered
her work in an issue of
Seed magazine, and found this piece with the irresistible
headline: "Super Sex Me."
Here's the lead:
Perhaps my all-time favorite organism is Bonellia viridis,
the green spoon worm. The female lives in crevices on the sea
floor. She's a sedentary lady: She doesn't roam in search
of adventure; she doesn't go out in search of food. Rather,
she spends her life in one spot, gathering her meals by snuffling
around her neighborhood with her long, extensible proboscis.
Her mate is miniscule: The green spoon worm has one of the most
extreme size differences known to exist between male and female, the
male being 200,000 times smaller than his mate. Her lifespan is a
couple of years. His is only a couple of months -- and he spends
his short life inside her reproductive tract, regurgitating sperm
through his mouth to fertilize her eggs. More ignominious still,
when he was first discovered, he was thought to be a nasty parasitic
infestation.
This passage exemplifies many of the writing strategies I presented to the science writers:
-
Judson is not afraid to use technical language or Latin names, but
follows the Latin classification with four words of one-syllable: the green spoon worm.
- She uses one number to describe size difference, and its a
beauty: 200,000. A couple of times, she even uses the very
unscientific phrase "a couple of..."
- She writes with a quirky human voice, using terms like "my all-time
favorite" to describe this organism. What kind of woman has an
all-time favorite organism and is an expert on its sex life? My
kind.
- She gives these creatures human qualities, a strategy that attracts us to
them. The female is a sedentary lady. She lives in a neighborhood.
- Throughout the essay, she plays with the miniaturized male to remind us of the contemporary status issues of men and women.
- She chooses a hot spot in her story -- the end of the second paragraph
-- to place her sharpest phrase, "nasty parasitic infestation."
Let me conclude with a shout-out to my new friends at NASW, but, no,
thank you, I will not carry a sliderule or wear a pocket
protector.
