How to Breathe Life into a Science Report – Anna Farro Henderson QUOTES FOR WRITERS
I have students circle the verbs from Observed Changes in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. The action in the first page includes: what has been, was, is, average, show, and produce.
Next, we circle the verbs in the prologue to Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dream where action calls, stops, slumps, drives, clinks, and cranks.
Disembodied from the sentence, the verbs in the climate report don’t invoke our senses while the clinks and cranks of young Einstein resonate in our body. This exercise makes visible the passive voice and invisible actors in conventional science writing.
Trained in academics, my first drafts, written behind closed doors, show this heavy imprint. I’ve learned to meet myself halfway. Words come as they will, and I choose what I do with them in revision.
Anna Farro Henderson
If you ever need to write a report that others will read and remember you can find her essay HERE
Photo credit: National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
3 comments on “How to Breathe Life into a Science Report – Anna Farro Henderson QUOTES FOR WRITERS”
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my daughter used to edit papers for the national academy of science. as she said, these were brilliant people who struggled to write in a way that people could tolerate and understand, and they could not find the elevator, but could create an atom splitter. they used to have a ‘sexy science of the week’ contest in the office
What a brilliant contest. I can see how that could be replicated elsewhere. Just before Covid I ran a workshop for a company worried that their reports weren’t being read by the business leaders who had commissioned them. They were employing recent science & maths graduates who could do the analysis but not describe it in a way that was accessible. I wonder if rather than a one-off workshop on creativity & language they should have been employing more humanities students.
Right. Most of them were English grads, nothing to do with science, but they understood how to use words to reach people