Category: Writing

TL:DR – Adding article summaries to my blog posts to help readers better navigate the 3700 Sciencebase posts.

Back in the days of print journalism, we used to write our copy, attach a headline and perhaps a strapline. For a news story, the article would usually follow a kind of pyramid structure. The headline telling pretty much the whole story, the strapline expanding on it a little, then the article building on the conventional Who, Why, What, Where, and When etc.

Of course, once editors got their hands on it, your sacred text might be shredded and at the very least the headline and strapline would be stripped away and replaced with whatever a sub-editor thought was better. It was almost obligatory. In ten years of writing for magazines and newspapers through the 1990s, it was quite rare, at least in the mainstream press, for any journalist to get their headline past a subbie. I think I managed it once or twice in 500 or so articles for New Scientist, Popular Science, and Science etc, and again once or twice with dozens of newspaper articles including in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and others.

Anyway, the web came along, I kind of helped pioneer science news online just as it was emerging from academia and into the mainstream, long before some of the big names even had a website. With the web, and more specifically Google, came pagerank and search engine optimisation (SEO), and the need to get keywords into headlines and straplines. Then the advent of social media led us to the world of clickbait, and so on.

At the time of writing, I’ve gone a bit hybrid old-new school with some recent articles. In the name of saving my readers time, I’ve added a TL:DR (too long, didn’t read) strapline to those articles. The TL:DR is basically a summary of the whole article. If the strapline doesn’t grab you, then there’s no need to read the whole article, you can quickly move to the next or abandon ship and visit another site.

There are 3700 articles in this blog some stretching back to December 1995 when I launched what I think was the first public news site specialising in chemistry, Elemental Discoveries. It may well have been the first science news site. Anyway, I am now wondering how to get ChatGPT to write the TL:DRs for all those thousands of articles, save me re-reading and sub-editing myself!

We all know the phrase “dumbing down”, it’s usually used as a rather dismissive phrase of content that has been written at a lower than expected intellectual level. TV, magazines, websites are said to be dumbing down if they over-simplify their message in an often vain attempt to attract or retain a bigger audience. It’s a miserable and cynical approach.

My approach to writing, and I’ve done a lot of it over the last three decades, has always been to write so that I can understand what I’ve written whether or not I’m writing for a specialist scientific or technical audience or a popular audience. So, when asked for a piece of writing advice recently on Twitter my first thought was to not do the opposite of dumbing down, which I’ve referred to there as dumbing up.

It would be just as cynical to make one’s writing overelaborate, more complicated, flouncy than it needs to be to get your point across. Moreover, there is a major pitfall in attempting to sound clever when you’re not – you end up looking stupid. You might use a word or phrase that you’ve heard for which you don’t know the actual definition and context in which it can be used, a reader who knows that word will know immediately that you’ve got it wrong and summarily dismiss your writing.

You need to know your audience, but perhaps more importantly, you need to know yourself, you need to be aware that your knowledge is limited and to not stretch your understanding beyond your capabilities. Of course, you can educate yourself on a subject and then, and only then, might you stretch your writing a little further, but always within the limits of that knowledge. Be aware of the known knowns, the unknown knowns, the unknown unknowns. Also be aware of bias arising from the very human ability to overestimate one’s abilities, The Dunning—Kruger effect. As they once told you – Keep it simple, stupid. Dumbing up is dumb.

Kicking against the pricks. Sounds a little crude for a science blog, you think? But, its etymology and meaning are new to me and not what my modern ear imagined them to be.

First, the phrase means to show opposition to those in authority, that much was obvious. It means to rebel, to stick it to the man, to stand up against those in charge, but perhaps to no avail. The modern vernacular might imagine the term “prick” to be a crude term of abuse, referring to one in authority euphemistically as a penis. But, the pricks in question are the sharpened sticks, the goads, that an ancient, and modern, cattle handler may use to control cattle.

The usage is to be found in the King James Bible (Acts 9:5) where Saul is told, on the road to Damascus, that it is hard for him to kick against the pricks. In other words, he is like an ox being goaded on the way to market and he cannot rebel by kicking out when those in authority attempt to coerce him with their metaphoprical sharpened sticks.

Ultimately, the ox must move when pricked by the driver regardless of how much it might kick. A modern usage might be heard in reference to a newly incarcerated criminal. The convicted felon will soon learn not to kick against the pricks, or the pricks, the prison guards, will make their life more difficult than it might otherwise be.

This is one of those stories that somebody on social media will shout at me and say it didn’t happen. Well, it did.

When I moved down south, I didn’t have a car, didn’t even drive. So, I used to jump on a train every few weeks to visit my parents who were still living in my hometown. It was a three-hop journey: Cambridge to Peterborough, Peterborough to Newcastle, and then a Metro ride to the family semi-detached pile.

I always took a rucksack. The one that I’d taken around Europe Inter-Railling, the one I’d worked around the US with, same one that I’d tour Australia a year later with the ultimately-to-be Mrs Sciencebase, and then again backpacking in Botswana and Zimbabwe back in the early ’90s. I’ve still got the rucksack.

It is fairly spacious, looks very battered these days, but wasn’t quite so battered the time I was pulling it out from the luggage storage area on an Intercity 125 as we pulled into Newcastle on one of the aforementioned trips back to the homestead.

As I was manhandling my luggage, the train was slowing quickly. An elderly American gent who had been sitting with his wife and another American couple in their requisite pastel-shaded polyester slacks, shirts, and blousons, as well as attendant golfing type hats offered to help. “No, it’s fine, thanks, I can manage, I responded,” struggling to get the bulging back full of what was basically a laundry todo incarnate for my mother.

He turned away, appeased and retorted to his friends that, “Oh, look Newcastle…as in carrying coals to”. Gentle giggles from the other American gent, and a sniff from one of the wives not at all impressed by his knowledge of British idioms. The other woman, presumably a former mining engineer, then asked the group and pointedly looking at me as she did so, knowing that I was obviously about to disembark asked “So, is that coal bituminous?”

Her accent was so rounded, so American, almost Pythonian in the Idle sense of the philosophy restaurant and the weird scientific poignancy of the question startled me somewhat. Was I being pranked in some weird Candid Camera style jape? Was Jeremy Beadle about? It was several years before Harry Hill. I’d done a coal module with Harry Marsh in my chemistry degree at Newcastle, inevitably, you might say, despite the Thatcher years. But, did I know? No I didn’t.

I flung my now safely dislodged rucksack with its malodourous offering of sweaty cottons and woollen socks over my shoulder leaped from the train and dashed head first for the barriers that would lead me to that final Metro hop to the coast.

Bituminous? Why? Why were these four unassuming Americans with their knowledge of my hometown’s most famous idiom so intrigued by the type of coal it might have been that was being taken. Had I been hallucinating? Was I part of some live-action re-enactment of a Monty Python sketch that had never been screened? Obviously not.

Oh, and it would have been bituminous, I think, not lignite and most probably not anthracite.

Footnote
I ran this a ten-part-thread true story on Twitter, each par was edited down to fit the twitter character limit.

I’m writing this on St Patrick’s Day, which is also apparently Happy Song Day, Sunday just gone was Mothering Sunday (or Mother’s Day if you want just the commercialized, non-religious version), it’s not long since it was St George’s Day, on which some English people celebrate a Palestinian mercenary from the fourth century who supposedly killed a mythical beast. Earlier in the month (first Thursday of March), the UK alone celebrated World Book Day to avoid a clash with the school Easter holidays (which come with Good Friday, Easter Day and Bank Holiday Monday, of course). The rest of the world will celebrate World Book Day with UNESCO on the 23rd of April.

International Women’s Day was the 8th March, although why women only get a single day of the annual 365 (and a bit) I don’t know. 14th March in the American calendar is Pi day, because it is 3.14 and this year it was even more special because the year is 2015, you can work it out for yourself. In the UK, where we usually write the day first and then the month (followed by the year, it’s more logical) we will have the longest wait for our pi day, which should occur on the 31st April (hat-tip to fellow science journalist Russ Swan for that witticism). American chemists also get “mole day”, which starts at 6:02am on the 23rd of October to give them an excuse to write something akin to Avogadro’s number 6.02 x 10^23. The American Chemical Society extends this concept to have Chemistry Week.

There are countless organizations and festivals touting for our attention, countless saints, religious periods, charity “flag” days, international advocacy day, Christmas Day, Pancake Tuesday, St Valentine’s Day. These days, Facebook reminds us endlessly to wish all our “friends” a Happy Birthday, of which there is inevitably at least one or two every day of the year and recently, 7 friends claimed to be celebrating their birthday. Personally, I fake my birthday on websites for the sake of security, so social media thinks I am well into my second century now and I noticed with interest that Apple allows its online registrants to set a birthday as far back as 1847, which is optimistic, unless the company knows something we don’t. The list of days is endless, seemingly not a day goes by without the day being a “day day”.

Here in Cambridge, we’re in the middle of the annual science festival. It used to be “science week”, but it was always a week earlier than the other science weeks around the country, now it last two weeks, just because, and overlaps with those others.

Whole years get in on the act too, of course, this year it’s both the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies and the International Year of Soils. Last year was the International Year of Crystallography and the International Year of Family Farming and more, at least according to the United Nations. 2016 will be the year of camelids (you know, camels, llamas, alpacas?) as well as the year of pulses, not the arterial type, lentils and beans.

The 1990s was the decade of the brain, at least as designated by former US president George W Bush, An irony not lost on many a wit. Currently, we’re in the decade of the mind, which lasts until 2022.

Admittedly, ever since we first spotted the regularity of the periods of light and dark, the phases of the moons and the changing of the seasons, we have broken up our lives into temporal units. There is no escape. I never wear a watch, but I do have a clock in view at all times on my laptop or my phone, I stick to deadlines, of a Friday evening the Sun will usually wend its way over the yardarm. But, in the absence of an annual “Day of Materials” to celebrate our polymers, our composites, our porous minerals, our semiconductors, our biomimetics, our carbon allotropes and so much more, could have just one day of the year that isn’t a “day day”. We could call it International Day of Not Being a Day Day” and sell flags to raise money for charity and have bloggers write about it and posters on public transport. Oh. Hold on…

TL:DR – David Bradley has worked in science communication since January 1989

Having set out as a chemist, I quickly realised I was better at the writing-up the lab reports part than the rolling up the labcoat sleeves and mucking about with test-tubes. In fact, I never found a labcoat to fit and I used to lose my pens and spatula every time I bent over to pick up whatever it was I’d last knocked off the bench.

Anyway, I spent a few months working and travelling in the USA and on my return did a stint in QA/QC for a food company up north. I landed a job in Cambridge with the Royal Society of Chemistry as a technical editor initially and got a good grounding in working with the scientific literature as well as beating other people’s words into shape. Rattled my way up to what was effectively deputy editor on Chem Comm.

I realised technical editing wasn’t for me and took an extended trip to travel Australia with my (now) wife. On my return, I steadily built up my freelance writing portfolio. You can see a list of past and present clients with whom I’ve worked over the last quarter of a century on my CV page. They range from the daily papers (Telegraph, Guardian) and popular magazines (New Scientist, Popular Science, American Scientist, Focus) to the likes of Science, Analytical Chemistry, Chem Soc Reviews, Nature and PNAS. I’ve written news, views and features, reported from conferences and interviewed many leading scientists as well as working with organisations such as ESF, EPSRC, ANL, NERC and many others on internal reports and brochures.

I’ve contributed to and acted as an editor on various books over the years, but finally settled down with a solo commission from independent publisher Elliott & Thompson in 2012 to write Deceived Wisdom (you can get a digital copy at a knockdown price at that link).

A few awards have been accumulated over the years, although you usually have to enter yourself into the journalism and science communication awards and I’m usually too embroiled in scientific discussion to get to a photocopier. Nevertheless: Winner — 1992 Daily Telegraph Science Writer of the Year, Runner-up — 1995 Chemical Industries Association (CIA) Awards, Commendation — 1997 UK Medical Journalism Awards, Shortlisted — 2001 Pirelli science multimedia awards, Finalist — 2008 weblogawards, Finalist — 2008 — Twitter Shorty Awards, Runner-up — 2010 Research Blogging awards.

Anyway, I hope I’ll still be capable of writing about science over the next 25 years to reach my 50th anniversary, but if it’s not Science, you know it’ll be Songs and Snaps…

Meanwhile, this day is the “memory” of my maternal grandmother and of surrealist artist Salvador Dali who died in 1989. Oh, and on a happier note it’s the day I met the then future Mrs Sciencebase (real name changed).