Ideas Into Words: Mastering The Craft Of Science Writing

Ideas into Words This page intentionally left blank words Mastering the Craft of Science Writing ideas into Elise Hancock Foreword by Robert Kanigel THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS Baltimore & London For my father, who would have been so proud. This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword, by Robert Kanigel Acknowledgments ix xvii 1. A Matter of Attitude 1 2. Finding Stories 29 3. Finding Out: Research and the Interview 45 4. Writing: Getting Started and the Structure 69 5. Writing: The Nitty Gritty 95 6. Refining Your Draft 111 7. When You’re Feeling Stuck 129 Afterword 145 Index 147 ©2003 The Johns Hopkins University Press Foreword © 2003 Robert Kanigel All rights reserved. Published 2003 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hancock, Elise. Ideas into words: mastering the craft of science writing / Elise Hancock. p. cm. ISBN 0-8018-7329-0 — ISBN 0-8018-7330-4 1. Technical writing. I. Title. T11 .H255 2003 808′.0665—dc21 2002011065 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. This page intentionally left blank Foreword As I stepped into her office, I found Elise in her desk chair, bent over a page of manuscript rolled up into her typewriter. She didn’t look up. She never looked up. Just a year or two earlier, that would still have infuriated me. Social graces, Elise? Remember those? But by now I was long past the point where I paid it any mind. So I sat and waited while she finished. Finally, she pulled out the page, gathered it together with one or two others and, still not looking up, passed them to me. It was a short essay for the Johns Hopkins Magazine, which she edited, but this was one of the little pieces she wrote herself. What, she wanted to know, did I think of it? Oh, it was fine, I too quickly said after reading it, then paused. I was a freelance writer, of the perpetually struggling sort, had done some assignments for Elise, and sought others. Elise was just a few years into her thirties, but enough older than me to seem more seasoned and mature. She was unusually tall, and a little forbidding. Actually, a lot forbidding: Genuine smiles came easily enough to her, but routine, social smiles—the kind that leave everyone in a room feeling relaxed and happy—did not. On this stern-faced woman and her opinion of my work, my livelihood depended. And now she wanted my opinion of something she’d written? Umm, maybe, I ventured, there was just a little trouble with this transition? And this word, here, perhaps it wasn’t exactly what she meant? Elise took back the manuscript and looked at it, hard, the way she always did—no knitted brows, just the blank screen of her face, the outside world absent. For a moment, the room lay still. Until, abruptly: “Oh, yes, Foreword x certainly.” And saying this, she pounced on the manuscript, pounced, using her whole body, arms and shoulders, not just her hands, to scribble in the words that made it just the slightest bit better. Only then did she look up and acknowledge me. I didn’t realize it right away, but that eager, egoless, unguarded “Oh, yes, certainly” stuck with me: Thank you, Elise. From a distance of twenty-five years, I write now of a tricky little professional situation. But for her, I am certain, it didn’t exist. For her there was no editor or writer, no senior or junior, no man or woman, no vanity, no pettiness, no personal