Reddit Reddit reviews A Field Guide for Science Writers: The Official Guide of the National Association of Science Writers

We found 3 Reddit comments about A Field Guide for Science Writers: The Official Guide of the National Association of Science Writers. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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A Field Guide for Science Writers: The Official Guide of the National Association of Science Writers
Oxford University Press USA
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3 Reddit comments about A Field Guide for Science Writers: The Official Guide of the National Association of Science Writers:

u/coldstar · 3 pointsr/Journalism

Professional science journalist here. Stories primarily come from scientific journals (the big ones such as Science, Nature, PNAS, PLOS ONE, etc, and smaller niche journals). We read through the listings for the journals each week and pick out any that look worth covering. Many journals, especially the big-name ones, put out embargoed journal highlights and press releases before publication. For instance Science puts out its upcoming scientific issue Sunday night with a Thursday embargo. For the smaller journals that don't do embargoes, we typically will just keep an eye on the journals web listing of accepted articles. All articles these days indicate a "corresponding author" with an email address. I never really have issue getting my emails returned, but then again I work for a well-known glossy magazine.

Besides journal articles, there are press releases from institutions, universities and research groups. Some of these are public releases while others are embargoed. By far the biggest repository of these releases is EurekAlert.org, which is produced by AAAS (the makers of Science). While a lot of press releases are publicly available on the site, you will need to be a credentialed and registered member of the media to peruse the embargoed content.

We also will head out to scientific conferences. Depending on where you live there's likely to be a few conferences near you throughout the year. Some conferences, such as the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting, take place in the same place while others, such as the Society for Neuroscience's meeting, move around a lot. For press these events are free and we'll typically spend a few days reporting news stories, chatting with scientists for feature ideas, looking at posters and not getting enough sleep. Scientists often say the conferences are exhausting, but we do everything they do and then have to write about it at night.

There are a few other ways to get stories, such as from social media stalking, FOIA requests, government meetings, making contacts within the field, and looking at faculty webpages.

For anyone else considering entering science writing as a profession, I highly recommend choosing a science-focused graduate program instead of a more general J-school track. Good schools include UCSC (arguably the best), MIT, NYU and BU. For /u/foundanamethatworks I recommend A Field Guide for Science Writers as a good starter book. You can get a used copy for around $12 off Amazon.

Let me know a bit more about your situation and I can probably recommend some good resources. Also feel free to PM me in the future if you need any advice!

u/epi_counts · 3 pointsr/AskAcademia

For scientific writing, I like this online course: Writing in the Sciences. As someone from a science/maths background who didn't get to do a lot of writing during my degree, this was great.

For science writing, I've got very practical books that I like: A field guide for science writers, and Science blogging: the essential guide.

u/turkturkelton · 2 pointsr/writing

I do some science writing in addition to academic scientific writing. The main part is to know what to leave out. Does it matter EXACTLY what experiments the researchers did? No. It matter's what they found (and that they actually found what they're saying they found).

Don't make long meandering sentences with a bunch of conjunctions and parenthetical phrases. Those are hard to read. Your readers are going to be reading very fast and if they get lost, they are going to stop and move on to something else. Don't lose your readers. You also have to know what they know. Can you just say polymers or do you have to explain what a polymer is? This is important.

Use active voice. None of that passive voice in science bullshit (unless that sentence calls for it). Use exciting verbs. Don't rely on a thesaurus. The reader will know.

If you like I'd be glad to read one of your pieces and give it a critique. Here are some good books to read if you're serious about getting into science writing.

Narrative Nonfiction--very popular now

Science Writer's Handbook

Fieldguide for science writing

Style book--not about science but needed for good writing, and it's funny