Get with child, and other helpful hints for writing your book

Annie Paul, author of Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives, did not take the usual, ho-hum road to pen her book. “I went to extreme measures,” she jokes. “I got pregnant.”

Although all of the panelists at “Great science writing part I: From eureka moment to book”, had their own adventures culminating in the birth of their own books, Paul’s was certainly the most creative. But thankfully, there are others ways to find inspiration and produce a worthy technology-driven tome, as shared by the speakers.

Maryn McKenna knew she had publishing gold when, after writing a freelance piece about MRSA and women for Self Magazine, “my email inbox exploded…and the story was picked up by The Today Show and Montel,” she recalls. “People wanted to know what the next dimension of the story was,” and thus a book proposal was conceived. Her book, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA, was published in 2010.

McKenna used a blog to organize her thoughts for her project, which is a great idea, echoed Brain Switek. His dinosaur-infused work, Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and Our Place in Nature” was also published this year. He described how he spent three years researching the field in order to gain the background necessary to write his book. During that time, he blogged every day. “A blog is a writing laboratory,” he stated, quoting another writer.

When you choose your subject, make certain you love it, because it will consume you for huge swaths of time. “[Writing] magazine articles [is] like dating someone, and writing a book is like marrying a person,” remarked Douglas Starr, author of “The Killer of Little Shepherds”. “If you pick the right person, it will be endlessly absorbing and it is the same thing with your book topic.”

Sleeptweeting

Overheard last night from a sleeping science writer who wishes to remain anonymous:

"Mumble mumble Twitter mumble."

Discover and engage your digital audience

It’s all about the audience.

This morning’s panel “Your next book will be a pixel: Navigating e-books and e-rights” emphasized the importance of engaging with your readers both before and after the publication process.

The real change in the digital revolution of book publishing, said Guy Gonzales, director of Programming and Business Development, Digital Book World, is the ability to interact with your audience.

It’s an incredible time for an author to get your work out there and build an audience, he said.

People have been talking about e-book revolution for so long that people can be pessimistic about its potential, said Brandon Badger, product manager for Google Books. “This is the moment.” Prices are dropping on e-readers, people are adopting smart phones in droves, and e-book revenues are nearly doubling every year.

Non-fiction enhanced e-books, those with integrated audio or video, or extras like interviews, are a very vibrant area, and non-traditional publishers are looking for that kind of content, said Gonzales. The potential for interactive visualization of data, especially with books on science, is the real opportunity of the growth of digital books, said Badger.

Digital books and their related content can ease the way authors interact with their audience. Take the example of Stephen Elliott’s book, the Adderall Diaries. Elliot developed an application for smart phones that features a chat room where readers can interact with the author and each other, said Gonzales.

It’s becoming more important for authors to manage their own communities, said Jason Allen Ashlock, founder and principal of Moveable Type Literacy Group. “Find out who your audience is and find out how they will discover you,” said Jason. Content may be king, but discoverability may be even more important, he said. He also pointed out that if authors can find out who their audience is early on, then they can speak more clearly to them.

One audience member attempting to make the transition into new, more interactive technologies asked if she needed to learn programming. Ashloft says no, writers just need the right partners. He advises looking for the agents and publishers educated enough to know what’s possible for your digital publication.

But education doesn’t hurt—as a writer, the more educated you are about interactive technologies, the better you will be at finding partners who can help you. Debbie Stier, formerly senior vice president, associate publisher, and director of Digital Publishing, HarperCollins, said that getting a device is worth the investment. “Be as informed as possible about trends that are happening,” she said.” “We all need to be thinking about [smart] phones as sensory devices."

Science Writers Connect Across the Globe

From China to Chile, great science stories happen all over the world. Scientists have long been collaborating with their colleagues across international borders, and the World Federation of Science Journalists is helping science writers to do the same thing.

WFSJ aims to facilitate communication amongst its 41 member associations and their individual members, said Jean-Marc Fleury, executive director of the federation.

One venue for such communication is the upcoming World Conference of Science Journalists, which will be held in June in Cairo.

NASW is co-hosting the conference at a beautiful hotel on the banks of the Nile. According to Deborah Blum, the Program Committee Chair, the ideas and the food should flow freely. Members of NASW should be on the lookout for soon-to-be-posted information about travel fellowships.

WFSJ also works to foster relationships between science writers in the developing world and their colleagues in countries with more established journalism traditions. The SjCOOP project connects aspiring journalists in African and Arab nations with experienced mentors. New journalists from the program have already gone on to create new science beats, win prizes for their reporting, and cover science that has impacted policy decisions, said Olfa Labassi, the Chief Financial Officer of WFSJ.


Although American science journalists may be wondering about the growth potential for their profession in the United States, Deborah Blum noted that science journalism is exploding in other countries around the world. Internationally-minded science writers will have many opportunities to collaborate with a global community of colleagues.

Statistics in Journalism: Handle with Care

There are many ways to get statistics wrong, and we learned about some of them from the speakers at the 'Get the numbers right: A workshop on reporting statistics' session.

They also offered advice on how journalists could avoid the common mistakes and treat statistics right. Clearly this is a topic that many people care about, judging by how packed the room was.

Odds Ratios Vs Relative Risk

Stephen Ornes started off by drawing on his experience as a fact-checker, and talked about his pet peeve: the inaccurate treatment of Odds Ratios.

Odds Ratios and Relative Risk are two frequent ways to report results from scientific studies. Odds Ratios are ratios of two different probabilities, and Orne's bottomline was that journalists shouldn't report Odds Ratios as a percentage of risk, as that's not what it refers to.

Relative Risk is a lot more intuitive, and is simply the risk of one group compared to another. But that means you always have to mention what groups you're comparing between for it to make sense.

Ornes said journalists often get statistics like Odds Ratios and Relative Risks wrong with the best of intentions--when they're trying to simplify them so they're easier to understand. His advice? "Befriend a statistician."

How to properly interpret statistics in a paper

Andrew Gellman, professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University was next up. Gellman has also published some popular books and runs a blog that was recommended by all the speakers as a good place to learn about basic statistical concepts.

Gellman used the example of a recent paper that concluded that 'beautiful parents have more daughters' to show some common problems with the paper's statistics. He talked about the questions that sceptical journalists should ask when writing about a paper like that.

His conclusion is that given the sample size and the lack of statistical validity, there really wasn't much one could conclude from that paper. And this was backed up by an independent study he did looking at whether People magazine's 50 sexiest people had more boys or girls.

Gellman admitted another reason he liked doing that study was "I loved being able to refer to Brad Pitt in my statistics paper."

Gellman also pointed out an important reason why journalists needed to be skeptical about the statistics in scientific studies: to be published in the peer-reviewed literature, studies have to be statistically significant. As a result, there's a bias towards overestimating effects in peer-reviewed studies.

Things journalists often get wrong about statistics

Tom Siegfried, Editor-in-Chief of Science News, talked about the common mistakes that journalists make when writing about statistics.

- He explained what exactly statistical significance means, emphasizing that it wasn't the same as 'significant' in the sense of important. With a large enough sample, you can almost always find something that's statistically significant.

- Also, lack of statistical significance doesn't mean that there is no effect. It could just mean the sample size is too small, and could require more studies.

He suggested writing about a statistically significant effect as something that "was seen at a level unlikely to be explained by chance," which I thought was a very clear way to express it.

He also pointed out that the recipe for wrong science was the same as the recipe for wrong science news: So here are the things to watch out:

- Is it the first report of something?

- Is it an advance in a hot research field?

- Is it contrary to previous belief?

This could mean that it's a really good study, or it could mean it's wrong, and it's up to us at journalists to think about that when writing about it, the speakers said.

Practical Advice

All three speakers weighed in on how journalists can avoid common mistakes in interpreting statistics:

1. Read the actual methods section of the paper, and use your own intuition. Does the result make sense based on what you expect? Look at other studies - does this agree with past results?

2. Then contact an expert to confirm. "Befriend a statistician," was Ornes' advice. He mentioned STATS.org, a site where journalists could ask statisticians about specific questions they had. Gellman pointed out that not all statisticians are the same, so it's important to find one who's an expert in the specific field you're writing about.

3. Judge how important the study actually is, and decide how to write about it. Explain the statistics in plain language, but be careful to not oversimplify or draw inaccurate conclusions.

And if the study draws a lot of attention but your analysis finds that it's not that significant, this might be an opportunity to explain your take on it.

The bottom-line was that statistics can be invaluable in interpreting complex information, but the onus is on journalists to do their research and know enough about statistics to get it right.

Can Scientists Paired With Rock Stars Improve Science Literacy?

Panelists tackling solutions to the collapse of science literacy and the collapse of science journalism differed radically on how to get the public interested in science and reading about it.

Co-moderator and new NASW President* Nancy Shute kicked off the discussion by citing "depressing numbers" reflecting peoples' knowledge of science, like what an experiment is, or what a placebo is. Though excited that DNA no longer has to be described to many, they did not seem to know much else, she said. Given the level of knowledge, and that news online is linked to hits, she asked whether science could "sneak into the matrix," and answered her own question by saying "No."

Carolyn L. Funk, Associate Professor and Director of the Commonwealth Poll, Virginia Commonwealth University, who consults for the NSF, said that the public barely distinguishes between science and pseudo science. She favored stressing the practical ways that science affects everyday life, like the chemistry of cooking or GPS.

But Chris Mooney, author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, said the public is somewhat engaged and cited the uproar over the demotion of Pluto from planet status. On the other hand, half of Americans don't accept the theory of evolution. He suggested that mass entertainment and Hollywood have helped increase scientific literacy, but not enough. He said pairing scientists with rock stars like Joe Perry works.

Jon Miller, Director of the Center for Science Literacy at the University of Michigan, said that if people don’t know what an atom or molecule is, they won’t understand nanotechnology, so he advocated improving science education at all levels, especially secondary. On a positive note, Gen X is the most scientifically literate generation ever, he said. Gen Xers surf and are selective about what they read online. He did not think the Pluto issue was a serious one. We have to think in terms of how the Internet has changed everything "because we are a just-in-time world."

As for solutions involving science writing, Mooney said scientific organizations are rethinking how best to communicate with the public. Another approach, emphasizing the human interest side of science came from the audience. Miller said it couldn't counteract attitudes about science resulting from cases of scientific fraud and doctors who are engaged in drug clinical trials and yet take money from pharmaceuticals.

Co-moderator Rick* Borchelt asked each how they would use one dollar to fix the problem. Miller said 50 cents for pre-college education, 25 to improve college courses (because we're failing worst there)*, and the rest for adult learning of all kinds. Mooney called for the government to subsidize careers in science communication for journalists and young scientists who did not get tenure.

Funk said she would put the money into the education system, especially standards for science learning, which is being eclipsed by math and reading standards.

* added on 11/9/10

The place of science journalism in science literacy

by Kara Rogers

If you had $1 to spend on improving science literacy in America, how would you spend it? That was the question posed by Rick Borchelt, an organizer of today's Civics of science session, to panelists Carolyn L. Funk, Jon Miller, and Chris Mooney.

Miller proposed spending half his dollar on improving pre-college science education, with the remainder on adult learning, a small portion of which would be used for science journalism. Mooney suggested spending the whole dollar on creating jobs for science journalists and young scientists, building an army of people devoted to improving public science literacy. And Funk said most of her dollar would go into the education system, with spending divided on efforts to incorporate science standards into elementary and lower-level education and on adult learning and informal adult education, the area where mainstream science journalism has its greatest impact.

Although the session raised more questions than it provided answers, the Agronsky & Co. style discussion, as promised, led to some interesting debate about the place of science journalism in science literacy and education in the United States. Science journalism is concerned mainly with delivering information about the latest developments in scientific discovery, and today most science reporting operates within the "just-in-time" model of new media. The cultural importance of science, the future of which could hinge on fitting into the new media scene, was perhaps most entertainingly discussed within the context of music and Rock Stars, a topic introduced by Mooney. Whether science and science journalism would benefit from riding the coat-tails of mass media remains to be seen.

The state of science literacy in America was addressed in data cited by several panelists. Data presented by Miller seemed to suggest that younger Americans, namely those belonging to Generation X, are more science literate than older Americans. Also according to Miller, in a study of science literacy in 34 countries, the United States ranked second best (behind Sweden), with roughly one-quarter of Americans considered science literate.

Of course, measuring science literacy is itself a matter of debate. As Funk pointed out, determining science literacy involves measuring multiple dimensions of scientific understanding. Several of these measures, such as textbook versus practical scientific knowledge, need to be reevaluated. Other measures of science literacy discussed by Funk included conceptual and factual understanding, knowledge of scientific processes, and ability to distinguish between science and pseudoscience.

Pseudoscience is particularly threatening to responsible scientific reporting. People look for scientific information when they need it, and from today's session, it is clear that among the many challenges facing science literacy is the plethora of information, trustworthy and untrustworthy, on the Internet.